College Girl author Laura Gray-Rosendale will talk about the importance of having conversations about sexual assault at 7 p.m. Tuesday, September 22, in the Prairie Room of the Bone Student Center at Illinois State University.
The event, titled “A Reading from College Girl,” is sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation, the Illinois State University Foundation, and the Department of English. The talk is free and open to the public, and a book signing will follow.
A memoir that beautifully integrates work in life writing, rhetoric, and trauma theory, College Girl recounts Gray-Rosendale’s brutal rape and its aftermath while a student at Syracuse University more than 25 years ago. The book was a Gold Medal Winner for the 2014 IPPY Award, a Book of the Year for Mountain Living, a Finalist for the May Sarton Memoir Award, and a Finalist for the USA Books Award in Memoir.
Gray-Rosendale is a President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow and professor of English at Northern Arizona University. In addition to College Girl, she is the author of Rethinking Basic Writing, co-editor with Sibylle Gruber of Alternative Rhetorics: Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition, and co-editor with Gil Harootunian of Fractured Feminisms: Rhetoric, Context, and Contestation.
The director of the S.T.A.R. (Successful Transition and Academic Readiness) English Writing Program for the LEADS Center, Gray-Rosenthal directs curriculum that addresses the needs of students who are first-generation and in economic need. She also teaches classes in rhetoric and popular culture, memoir, graduate composition, literacy studies, theories of autobiography, and the history of rhetoric.
The talk is part of The Speaker Series of Illinois State University, which seeks to bring innovative and enlightening speakers to the campus with the aim of providing the community with a platform to foster dialogue, cultivate enriching ideas, and continue an appreciation of learning as an active and lifelong process.
More information on all speakers can be found on the Speaker Series website.
