Distributed April 1, 2002
For Immediate Release

News Service Contact: Mary Jo Curtis



Cokie Roberts to deliver second annual Casey Shearer Lecture April 11

ABC News chief congressional analyst Cokie Roberts, co-anchor of This Week With Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts, will give the second annual Casey Shearer Memorial Lecture on Thursday, April 11, 2002, at 6:30 p.m. in the Salomon Center for Teaching. The lecture series honors the memory of Casey Shearer ’00, who died just days before he was to graduate from Brown.


PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Cokie Roberts, chief congressional analyst for ABC News, will give the second Casey Shearer Memorial Lecture on Thursday, April 11, 2002, at 6:30 p.m. in the Richard and Edna Salomon Center for Teaching on The College Green.

This event, “An Evening with Cokie Roberts,” is free and open to the public. The lecture series honors the memory of Casey Shearer ’00, a promising young writer and aspiring sportscaster who died May 23, 2000, just days before he was to graduate from Brown.

Cokie Roberts is co-anchor of the ABC News Sunday morning broadcast This Week With Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts. She covers politics, Congress and public policy for World News Tonight and other ABC News broadcasts, and she is a news analyst for National Public Radio (NPR), where she was the congressional correspondent for more than 10 years. During that time she won numerous awards, including the highest honor in public radio, the Edward R. Murrow Award. She was also the first broadcast journalist to win the prestigious Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for coverage of Congress. In 1991 she won an Emmy Award for her contribution to the ABC News special Who is Ross Perot?

Before joining ABC News in 1988, Roberts was a contributor to PBS-TV’s MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour. She was a reporter for CBS News in Athens, Greece, prior to joining the news staff at NPR. In addition, she produced and hosted a public affairs program on WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., and, from 1981 to 1984, she co-hosted The Lawmakers, a weekly public television program on Congress.

Roberts is also the author of the national bestseller, We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters (1998), in which she explores the diverse roles women have played throughout American history and the connections and distinctions among different generations of women. With her husband Steven V. Roberts, she writes a weekly column syndicated by United Media in major newspapers throughout the country. In February 2000 the couple published From This Day Forward, an account of their more than 30-year marriage and other marriages in American history. Roberts is a 1964 graduate of Wellesley College, and she is the recipient of 15 honorary degrees.

Casey Shearer ’00

Casey Shearer ’00 was a vibrant, talented, and well-loved member of the Brown community. An economics concentrator, he also studied Spanish, political science and literature, and he was one of a group that revived Brown Student Radio (WBSR). He was best known on campus as the station’s play-by-play sports announcer and as the author of the weekly sports column “On the Case” in the College Hill Independent.

Born and raised in Santa Monica, Calif., where his mother, Ruth Goldway, was once mayor, Shearer graduated from high school in Finland, where his father, Occidental College Professor Derek Shearer, served as the U.S. ambassador. A top student at Brown, he was a member of the economics honor society and received his magna cum laude pin the Friday before he was to graduate. That same day, during his regular pick-up basketball game at the athletic center, Shearer’s heart stopped and he collapsed, the victim of an undetected virus that had infected his heart; he died four days later. His memorial service in Sayles Hall later that week was attended by several hundred members of the Brown community, as well as family and friends, including Bill and Hillary Clinton.

######