Newark Mayor Booker presents Morrison Lectures

By Staff on Sept. 25, 2008, 10:21 a.m.

Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, N.J., will deliver the annual Toni Morrison Lectures on "The Unfinished Journey of America's Spirit" at 8 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, Oct. 1-3, in McCosh 50.

Booker will address the following topics: "The Past: A Testimony to the Impossible" on Oct. 1; "The Present: Through Cynicism, Negativity and Self-Doubt" on Oct. 2; and "The Future: Humble Hopes and Insane Idealism" on Oct. 3.

Booker has been mayor of New Jersey's largest city since July 2006 and is the third person to lead Newark since 1970. He launched his political career in 1998 after serving as staff attorney for the Urban Justice Center and as a program coordinator of the Newark Youth Project. Booker spent four years as a Newark City Council member, helping to implement community programs such as increasing security at public housing facilities and building new playgrounds. He has been named one of the country's "40 best and brightest" by Esquire magazine, one of the state's "top 40 under 40" by New Jersey Monthly magazine and one of "America's most powerful players under 40" by Black Enterprise magazine.

A graduate of Stanford University, Booker also earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and received a law degree from Yale University.

Sponsored jointly by the Center for African American Studies and Princeton University Press, the Toni Morrison Lectures were inaugurated in 2006 to spotlight the work of prominent scholars and writers and to honor Morrison, Princeton's Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities Emeritus. The lectures presented by Booker will be compiled with other Toni Morrison Lectures to be published in book form by Princeton University Press.

Previous lecturers in the series were Cornel West, Princeton's Class of 1943 University Professor in the Center for African American Studies, and Haitian-born author Edwidge Danticat.
Booker's lectures will be simulcast live in McCosh 46. They also will be webcast live and archived online for later viewing at on the University's Webmedia site.

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