Internationally acclaimed author and civil rights activist Jonathan Kozol to speak here Wednesday

A lecture here this week by internationally acclaimed author, educator and civil rights activist Jonathan Kozol will be the first of a two-part Fall Community Dialogue Series sponsored by several University of St. Thomas programs and departments.

Jonathan Kozol

The series is designed to involve St. Thomas students, staff and faculty in a discussion on the impact that poverty, racism and public policy have on the nation's youth.

Kozol, whose Death at an Early Age won the 1968 National Book Award and sold more than 2 million copies worldwide, will speak from 7 to 9:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 10, in the auditorium of O'Shaughnessy Educational Center.

The talk, free and open to the public, will be followed by a reception and book-signing in the first-floor atrium of O'Shaughnessy Educational Center.

The second part of the series is a talk and discussion that will run from 4:30 to 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 15, in the third-floor lounge, Room 304, of Murray-Herrick Campus Center.

At that event, Ron Krietemeyer, director of poverty education at Catholic Charities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, will discuss the 2007 national Catholic Charities report, "Poverty and Racism: Overlapping Threats to the Common Good." His talk will be followed by small-group discussions.

The two-part series is sponsored by the university's Multicultural Student Services, and co-sponsored by Campus Ministry, University Lectures Committee, Service Learning, Center for Intercultural Learning and Community Engagement, Office for Mission and Division of Academic Affairs.

A native of Boston, Kozol, 72, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University. After trying his hand as a novelist, he began teaching in inner-city schools and his first work of nonfiction, Death at an Early Age, described his first year as a teacher in Boston's public schools.

Over the past four decades his books have included Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America; Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation; Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope; The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America; and his most recent, the 2007 Letters to a Young Teacher. He is a strong advocate of integrated public schools and a critic of the voucher movement.

In addition to winning a Rhodes Scholarship and two Guggenheim Fellowships, Kozol has receive many national book awards; among them are the Conscience-in-Media Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

The Chicago Sun Times has called Kozol "today's most eloquent spokesman for America's disenfranchised."