Native American Pulitzer Prize Author Speaking at Westminster

Dr. Scott Momaday, Native American scholar, poet, and Pulitzer Prize winning author, will speak at Westminster College Wednesday, Sept. 25, at 8 p.m. in Orr Auditorium.

Momaday was born a Kiowa in the Oklahoma Dustbowl, raised on the reservations in the Southwest, and steeped in the Native American oral tradition. His brilliant use of words has led him to an acclaimed career. For more than 30 years, his creative accomplishments have included fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and paintings.

He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel House Made of Dawn, and has received countless other awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, The Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement, a National Institute of Arts and Letters award, and the "Mondello," Italy's highest literary honor. Momaday is the founder of "The Buffalo Trust," a non-profit foundation for the preservation and restoration of Native American Culture and heritage. But mostly he is a storyteller, keeping alive Native American myths and memories.

Momaday earned his undergraduate degree from the University of New Mexico, and his master's and Ph.D. from Stanford University. 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 was the first professor to teach American literature at the University of Moscow.

This first Diversity Symposium event for the 2002-2003 academic year is part of Westminster's continuing Sesquicentennial Celebration. The event is free and open to the public, and is followed by a reception and book signing.

For more information, contact Dr. Barbara Faires, professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics at (724) 946-7293 or e-mail faires@westminster.edu.

More Stories