New York Times Columnist to Give Annual Jenks Chair Lecture

Samuel G. Freedman, an award-winning author, columnist, and professor, will give a reading as part of the Working Writers Series on Thursday, March 27 at 7:30 p.m. in Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross. The event, sponsored by the College’s Creative Writing Program and W.H. Jenks Chair of Contemporary American Letters, is free and open to the public.

“Beyond his own brilliance as a journalist and author, he has an uncommon gift for inspiring young writers to take their writing seriously,” said Leah Hager Cohen, W.H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters and visiting professor of English department, who worked closely with Freedman as a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. “He gets people to work harder, and better, than they might ever have thought themselves capable. I am certainly a case in point. Without his remarkable generosity and mentorship, I very much doubt I would be here as the Jenks Chair, striving to pass along to Holy Cross students some of what he gave me when I was his student nearly 25 years ago.”

Samuel G. Freedman has written seven books, most recently “Breaking The Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Game and Changed the Course of Civil Rights”(Simon & Schuster, 2013). His book “Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students, and Their High School” (HarperCollins, 1991) was a finalist for the National Book Award and “The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond” (Simon & Schuster, 1996) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to currently writing for The New York Times column “On Religion,” Freedman was named the nation's outstanding journalism educator in 1997 by the Society of Professional Journalists, and in 2012, he received Columbia University's Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching for his work as a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Freedman's class in book-writing, which has been featured in Publishers Weekly and the Christian Science Monitor, has developed more than 65 authors, editors, and agents.