Award-winning author, teacher, and social critic Jonathan Kozol will speak about his new book Fire in the Ashes at 11:45 a.m. on Monday, September 10 in Oxy’s Thorne Hall.
Kozol’s talk, which is free and open to the public, will focus on the racial and economic inequities present in our K-12 public school system and the implications for American society. He will be available to sign copies of his new book following the lecture.
Kozol’s new book, Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America, picks up the stories of students whose early lives he portrayed in the best-selling Amazing Grace: Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation and Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America. The Chicago Sun-Times has called the former Rhodes Scholar "today’s most eloquent spokesman for America’s disenfranchised."
Kozol’s works have been awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the Conscience in Media Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion.
Amazing Grace was awarded the Ainsfield-Wolf Book Award, previously given to the works of Dr. Martin Luther King and Langston Hughes. Amazing Grace, about Kozol’s visits to the South Bronx, was hailed by scholars as a classic and praised by Nobel Laureates Toni Morrison and Elie Wiesel.
Kozol’s lecture, which kicks off the 2012-13 Cultural Studies Program Lecture Series, is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
