Award-winning author Katherine Boo to speak at UIS

WHAT: Katherine Boo will discuss her award-winning book Behind the Beautiful Forevers during a rescheduled event at the University of Illinois Springfield. Boo had been scheduled to speak last fall at the keynote event for the first “One Book, One UIS” initiative, but was forced to cancel due to illness. This event is free and open to the public.

WHEN: Tuesday, April 1, 2014 at 7:00 p.m.

WHERE: UIS Brookens Auditorium, located on the lower level of Brookens Library

DETAILS: Behind the Beautiful Forevers won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2012, was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, and appeared on a host of “best book” lists for 2012. The book is an account of the lives of the inhabitants of Annawadi, a Mumbai slum in the shadows of luxury hotels and the international airport. Katherine Boo followed the lives of several key residents of Annawadi as the global economic downturn in 2008 and 2009 added to the tensions that already existed over issues of religion, caste, and gender. Her portraits are compelling, sometimes heartbreaking, and offer insight into globalization at the personal level in one of the 21st century’s great, unequal cities.

Katherine Boo is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post. She learned to report at the alternative weekly, Washington City Paper, after which she worked as a writer and co-editor of The Washington Monthly magazine. Over the years, her reporting from disadvantaged communities has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “Genius” grant, and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. Boo has said about her work: “Very little journalism is world changing. But if change is to happen, it will be because people with power have a better sense of what’s happening to people who have none.”

The “One Book, One UIS” initiative is being coordinated by Brookens Library and is supported by funding from Friends of Brookens Library, the Chancellor’s Office, the Diversity Center, and the ECCE Speakers Series. A book signing will immediately follow the lecture.