The Sandspur

Issue date: 3/12/07 Section: News

MAYA ANGELOU
Angelou spent the early years of her life moving back and forth between her mother's and grandmother's house. At the age of eight,
she confessed that her mother's boyfriend had sexually abused her and her uncle beat the man to death. After that Angelou became mute and did not speak for nearly five years. She believed that her words caused the death of another man.

Angelou is most well-known for her autobiographical writings "I Know Why the Cages Bird Sings" and "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes." She was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her volume of poetry. In 1993, Angelou read her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" during Bill Clinton's Presidential inauguration. She was the second poet to be asked to read at an inauguration, the first being Robert Frost at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy.

SALMAN RUSHDIE
Rushdie grew up in a Muslim family in Mumbai, India. He attended King's College at Cambridge in England and later began a career with the firm Ayer Baker, but later became a full-time writer. He pursued a career as a British-Indian essayist and fiction writer. He achieved fame in 1981 for his second novel, "Midnight's Children," which won the prestigious Booker Prize. He is currently a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Most of his fiction is set in the subcontinent of India, where he was born. He is best known for the violent reactions that his fourth novel, "The Satanic Verses," provoked among the Muslim community. He spent years underground an attempted assassination and only appeared in public every once in a while.

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Fukuyama received a B.A. in classics from Cornell University and a Ph. D from Harvard in Political Science. He is best known as the author of "The End of History and the Last Man," in which he made an argument that human history as a struggle between ideologies is at an end. He declares that
there will be an eventual triumph of political and economic liberalism. Fukuyama's work assumes that human nature is
governed by a desire for recognition and it is liberal democracy which provides a way of satisfying the need for recognition.

Fukuyama, along with other prominent political thinkers, founded "The American Interest, a quarterly magazine devoted
to the theme of "America in the World."

TICKET INFORMATION
Ticket pick-up dates for the Student Colloquy are March 21, 22, 23 in the Campus Center at 12:00-2:00. Tickets are required for keynote events: Maya Angelou, Mon. March 26, Salman Rushdie, Tues. March 27, Francis Fukuyama, Wed. March 28.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools