NewsRelease

(Posted 3-23-04)
Contact: Dan Nonte, 336-334-5371

Author and Activist Jonathan Kozol to Speak April 20

GREENSBORO – Award-winning author, activist and educator Jonathan Kozol, whose work during the past four decades has put a spotlight on the plight of the poor, will speak April 20 at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

The 7:30 p.m. speech in Elliott University Center Auditorium is part of the yearlong program “Barriers to Learning: Issues in Literacy and Education from a Race and Gender Perspective” sponsored by Jackson Library.

In 1967, during the heart of the civil rights movement, Kozol, a young, white teacher in a poor, black neighborhood of Boston, was fired for reading a Langston Hughes poem to his fourth-grade students.

His book about that first year as a teacher, “Death at an Early Age,” won the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. Now regarded as a classic by educators, the book has sold more than 2 million copies.

After being fired from his first job, he taught at a suburban school. The shock of going from one of the country's poorest public schools to one of its richest never left him.

He taught at South Boston High during the city's desegregation crisis. Working with black and Hispanic parents, he helped set up a storefront learning center that became a model for many others throughout the country.

A few days before Christmas 1985, he spent an evening at a homeless shelter in New York. Nightlong conversations with mothers and children led him to remain there for much of the winter and, eventually, to pen “Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America,” a narrative about the day-to-day struggle of some of the poorest people in America.

The book received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for 1989 and the Conscience-in-Media Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Kozol founded The Fund for the Homeless, a non-profit organization that provides homeless families with emergency assistance.

He revisited America's schools in 1989, visiting rich and poor schools in more than 30 communities. This experience led him to write “Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools,” which received The New England Book Award in non-fiction.

In 1993, he journeyed to the South Bronx. Two years of conversations with children, clergy and parents became the basis for “Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation.” The book explores the lives of black and Hispanic children whom, although they live in one of the most violent communities in the developed world, retain a soaring spiritual transcendence. “Amazing Grace” became a national best-seller within three weeks of its publication and received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

He published “Ordinary Resurrections,” a book about the persistent innocence of children, in 2000. Like “Amazing Grace,” this work takes place in the South Bronx; but this time readers see life through the eyes of children, not, as the author puts it, from the perspective of a man encumbered with a Harvard education.

Kozol, a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard and a Rhodes Scholar, lives in Massachusetts.

Copies of his books will be sold before and after the program, and he will sign copies following his remarks.

For more information, visit Jackson Library's events calendar or call Special Projects Librarian Barry Miller at 256-0112.

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