Distributed February 21, 2003
For Immediate Release

News Service Contact: Mary Jo Curtis



Stories and Storytellers

Pulitzer-winning writer N. Scott Momaday to speak March 6

Pulitzer Prize-winning author N. Scott Momaday will speak on “Native American Oral Traditions: The Stories and Storytellers” on Thursday, March 6, 2003, at 6:30 p.m. in the Salomon Center for Teaching. This event is free and open to the public.


PROVIDENCE, R.I. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist N. Scott Momaday will speak on “Native American Oral Traditions: The Stories and Storytellers” on Thursday, March 6, 2003, at 6:30 p.m. in the Salomon Center for Teaching on The College Green.

Momaday, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn, is a poet, playwright, painter and storyteller, as well as a professor of English and American literature. Born a Kiowa in the Oklahoma dustbowl, he was raised on reservations in the Southwest, steeped in oral tradition.

Momaday

Stories and the storytellers
Poet, playwright, painter and storyteller N. Scott Momaday will speak at Brown on Thursday, March 6. Among many honors and activities, Momaday is also the founder and chairman of The Buffalo Trust, a non-profit foundation for the preservation and restoration of Native American culture and heritage.

He is the author of numerous books, including The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Oxford University Press), House Made of Dawn (Harper & Row), The Way to Rainy Mountain (University of New Mexico Press), Angle of Geese (David R. Godine), The Gourd Dancer (Harper & Row), The Names (Harper & Row), The Ancient Child (Doubleday), In the Presence of the Sun (St. Martin’s Press), The Man Made of Words (St. Martin’s Press), In The Bear’s House (St. Martin’s Press) and Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story (University of New Mexico Press). His writings have been translated into French, German, Italian, Russian Japanese and Spanish, and he has written for Natural History, American West, The New York Review of Books, New York Newsday, The New York Times and other periodicals.

Momaday’s play, The Indolent Boys, premiered at the Syracuse Stage in 1994, and his children's play, Children of the Sun, opened at the Kennedy Center in 1997. His paintings, drawings and prints have been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. He has been a commentator on National Public Radio's “All Things Considered.” He narrates the PBS American Experience special, Last Stand at little Bighorn, and is a featured, on-camera commentator on the PBS series, The West, produced by Ken Burns. He has lectured and given readings in many countries.

Momaday received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New Mexico in 1958 and a Master of Arts and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1960 and 1963, respectively. He has held tenured appointments at the University of California-Berkeley, Stanford University, the University of California-Santa Barbara and the University of Arizona. He has been a visiting professor at Columbia and Princeton and in 1974 became the first professor to teach American literature at the University of Moscow in Russia.

Currently Regents Professor of the Humanities at the University of Arizona, Momaday is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds 12 honorary degrees from American colleges and universities, including Yale University, the University of Massachusetts and the University of Wisconsin. He has received numerous awards for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Institute of Arts and Letters award, the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement, and the Premio Letterario Internationale Mondello, Italy's highest literary award.

Momaday sits on the boards of The Grand Canyon Trust, The Wheelwright Museum and the School of American Research and is the President of the American Indian Hall of Fame. He is also the founder and chairman of The Buffalo Trust, a non-profit foundation for the preservation and restoration of Native American culture and heritage.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is being sponsored by the Office of the President, the Third World Center and Native Americans at Brown. For more information, call (401) 863-2474.

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