By Dan Nonte, University Relations
Leonard Pitts Jr.
Columnist, author and Pulitzer Prize winner Leonard Pitts Jr. will headline the annual UNCG Friends of the Library dinner March 20.
Pitts started his career as a writer for Casey Kasem's radio program “American Top 40.” In 1991, The Miami Herald hired him as a pop music critic.
By 1994, he was writing a nationally syndicated column about race and current affairs. His 1999 book “Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood” was a bestseller. He won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2004.
Pitts was born and raised in Southern California. Since 1995, he has lived in Bowie, Md., a suburb of Washington, with his wife and five children.
After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, Pitt's Herald column, headlined “We'll Go Forward from This Moment,” was widely circulated on the Internet and frequently quoted in the press.
In the column, Pitt bluntly expressed his anger, defiance, and resolve to an unnamed terrorist: “You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard.”
The dinner will be held in Cone Ballroom, Elliott University Center. Tickets, $35 for members and $45 for non-members, are now on sale through the University Box Office, (336) 334-4849 or online, for an additional fee, http://boxoffice.uncg.edu. Tickets for the presentation only are $10. Parking is available in the Walker Avenue Parking Deck.
The News and Record is sponsoring the event.
