DAVENPORT — Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson will give this year’s Baecke Endowment for the Humanities lecture at St. Ambrose University. The lecture will be held Monday, April 20, at 7 p.m. in Christ the King Chapel, located on the SAU campus. The presentation is free and open to the public; a reception will follow.
Robinson is the author of “Gilead,” which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Her first book, the modern classic “Housekeeping” (1981), was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won the PEN/Ernest Hemmingway Award for First Fiction; the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the Academy of American Arts and Letters; and was included in The New York Times Books of the Century. Her most recent novel, “Home,” was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.
Robinson has been a visiting professor at numerous universities and currently teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Iowa City.
The Baecke Endowment for the Humanities was established in 1981 by Mr. and Mrs. Albert Baecke to enhance teaching and educational experiences in the humanities, considered to be the heart of a liberal arts education. In addition to their support of the endowment, the Baeckes founded a scholarship program at St. Ambrose for students planning to major in the humanities.
For more information, contact Bea Jacobson, professor of English and chair of the Baecke Endowment for the Humanities lecture committee, at (563) 333-6100.