Marilynne Robinson lecture highlights themes of religion and modern life
A critically acclaimed best-selling author, Pulitzer Prize winner and educator will present a lecture at Kirkwood Community College April 9. Dr. Marilynne Robinson will present a lecture on “History and Moral Conflict: The Role of Religion in Public Discourse” at 11 a.m. in 234 Cedar Hall on the main Kirkwood campus. The program is free and open to the public.
Robinson is a native of Idaho and earned her undergraduate degree in English at Brown University. She later pursued graduate studies in English at The University of Washington, where she began writing her first novel, Housekeeping (1981), which won the PEN/Hemingway award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
After the success of Housekeeping, Robinson focused on essay-writing for a variety of publications including Harper’s, The Paris Review, and The New York Times Book Review. Many of these essays were later collected in a critically acclaimed anthology called The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998).
Her second novel, Gilead, won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Ambassador Book Award. Gilead takes the form of a letter from an aging Iowa preacher to his seven-year-old son. Written in simple and sparse prose, the book was acclaimed by one critic as “an uplifting meditation on life.”
Robinson’s third novel, Home (2008), is also set in the fictional village of Gilead, Iowa and is something of a follow-up to Gilead, once again a story written in plain speech about ordinary Midwestern characters. Home is a National Book Award finalist.
Marilynne Robinson currently teaches at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and is a sought-after speaker and lecturer at colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad.
Robinson’s April 9 discussion is made possible by the Kirkwood Arts & Humanities department.