Public Invited To Author Richard Rodriguez Lecture at Framingham State Monday

Framingham State University is hosting noted intellectual, essayist and author Richard Rodriguez for a public lecture on Monday, Sept. 15, as part of the President‟s Distinguished Lecture Series.

The title of the lecture is “The Scholarship Boy” and the American “I.” The free event is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. in the Dwight Hall Performing Arts Center.

A master of the personal essay, Richard Rodriguez writes about the intersection of his personal life with some of the most vexing public issues of our time. Selections from his first book, Hunger of Memory (1982), which will be the focus of his talk, remain controversial today because of his skepticism regarding affirmative action and bilingual education.

Days of Obligation (1992), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction and is his longest treatment of the differences separating his ancestral Mexico from the United States, is a “philosophical travel book” that takes the reader on a journey from 16th century Mexico City to the AIDS plague years in San Francisco.

More recently, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002), nominated for the National Book Critics Award, presents an essay on race, mixture, and the erotic meaning of brown in America. His latest work, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013) is framed by an examination of the Middle Eastern desert ecology into which the God of Judaism and Christianity and Islam revealed Himself. The labels often attached to him, such as “gay,” “Hispanic,” and “Roman Catholic,” get tested in the work as it ranges from a discussion of the Las Vegas of Elvis to the death and life of Cesar Chavez and that of Hamlet, and finally to an examination of sexuality, the modern fear of place and of the body, and the secular dream of ”going green”in today’s popular ecology movement.

A book signing will follow the lecture at 6 p.m.