Kiowa poet will speak at college

NEW WILMINGTON, Pa. -- Scott Momaday, American Indian scholar, poet and Pulitzer Prize winning author, will speak at 8 p.m. Wednesday in Westminster College's Orr Auditorium.
The event, free and open to the public, is followed by a reception and book signing.
Momaday was born a Kiowa in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, reared on the reservations in the Southwest and steeped in the American Indian oral tradition. For more than 30 years, his creative accomplishments have included fiction, poetry, plays, essays and paintings.
He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel "House Made of Dawn" and has received countless other awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, The Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement, a National Institute of Arts and Letters award and the "Mondello," Italy's highest literary honor.
Momaday is the founder of The Buffalo Trust, a nonprofit foundation for the preservation and restoration of American Indian heritage. But mostly he is a storyteller, keeping alive traditions and memories.
Momaday earned his undergraduate degree from the University of New Mexico, and his master's and doctorate's from Stanford University in California. He has held tenured appointments at the University of California-Berkeley, Stanford, the University of California-Santa Barbara and the University of Arizona. He has been a visiting professor at Columbia and Princeton and was the first professor to teach American literature at the University of Moscow.
This first Diversity Symposium event for the 2002-03 academic year is part of Westminster's continuing Sesquicentennial Celebration.
For more information, contact Barbara Faires, professor and chair of the department of mathematics, at (724) 946-7293 or e-mail faires@westminster.edu.