Colby-Sawyer College’s Cultural Events Committee will host Pulitzer Prize-winning author Diane McWhorter for a talk on Thursday, March 20, at 7 PM in Wheeler Hall at the Ware Student Center. The event is free and open to the public.

A journalist and commentator, McWhorter travels extensively to lecture on race, freedom and justice. She is the author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama—The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, a dramatic account of the civil rights era battle in her hometown and her family’s involvement. Carry Me Home won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Southern Book Award for Nonfiction, the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, the Clarence Cason Award, the Horace Mann Bond Book Award from Harvard University’s WEB Du Bois Institute, and the English-Speaking Union Ambassador Award. In 2011 Time named Carry Me Home to its list of the 100 best nonfiction books published since the magazine’s 1923 founding.

McWhorter’s young adult history of the civil rights movement, A Dream of Freedom, was published by Scholastic in 2004 and is listed on The New York Times’ nine “Notable Children’s Books of 2004” and USA Today’s “Best Children’s History.” Her work has also been anthologized in many collections.

A longtime contributor to The New York Times, McWhorter has written articles on race, politics, and culture that have appeared in The Nation, Slate, The American Scholar, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, Legal Affairs, Harper’s and Boston Magazine. She has been an adjunct instructor of creative nonfiction at Columbia University’s graduate School of the Arts and is a member of the Society of American Historians.

Raised in Birmingham and educated at Wellesley College, McWhorter graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Comparative Literature. She was a 2007 Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, a 2009 Guggenheim fellow, a 2010 residential scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, a 2011-12 fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a 2012-2013 fellow at Harvard’s WEB Du Bois Institute/Hutchins Center. Currently she is the AM Rosenthal Writer-in-Residence at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.