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May 12, 2008

Award-winning author to deliver Brown baccalaureate

PROVIDENCE -- Award-winning author Dave Eggers will deliver the May 24 baccalaureate address to Brown University's graduating seniors.

Eggers, who received a Brown honorary degree in 2005, will speak at 3 p.m. in the First Baptist Church in America.

The speech precedes the university’s 240th commencement on May 25, during which actor and filmmaker Robert Redford is among seven who will receive honorary degrees. Redford is a previous winner of another Rhode Island-based honor -- a 2002 Pell Award for excellence in the arts.

Eggers founded McSweeney’s, a publishing house in San Francisco that publishes a quarterly literary magazine. He is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a 2000 memoir about raising his younger brother after both their parents died of cancer within weeks of each other. The book was a 2001 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

He has since written You Shall Know Our Velocity! -- a work of fiction that won the 2003 Independent Book Award, and What is the What, a fictional tale based on the experience of a Sudanese refugee.

During commencement, Brown will award honorary degrees to seven. Besides Redford, they are: author Edwidge Danticat, choreographer Judith Jamison, lawyer and retiring university trustee Matthew J. Mallow, National University of Singapore President Shih Choon Fong, literary agent and retiring university trustee Wendy J. Strothman, and planetary geophysicist Maria T. Zuber.

Posted by Mike McKinney  at 4:38 PM | Permalink

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