YSU LECTURE SERIES Prize-winning author to speak

Toni Morrison, who's won a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize, was born in Lorain.
YOUNGSTOWN -- Nobel Prize laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison will speak at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 18 in Powers Auditorium as part of the Skeggs Lecture Series at Youngstown State University.
The event is free and open to the public, but tickets are required for admission. Tickets will be available beginning Sept. 2 at Bytes and Pieces in Kilcawley Center at Youngstown State University. There is a limit of four tickets per person.
Morrison, who was born in Lorain, is one of the most celebrated contemporary American novelists, with seven major novels receiving extensive critical acclaim: "The Bluest Eye," "Sula," "Song of Solomon," "Tar Baby," "Beloved," "Jazz," and "Paradise."
"Beloved" earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and "Song of Solomon" won the National Book Critics Award in 1977. Both were chosen as the main selections for the Book of the Month Club.
Awards, degrees
She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
The first recipient of the Washington College Literary Award in 1987, Morrison was appointed the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University in 1989. She has received honorary degrees from Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Sarah Lawrence, Oberlin, Dartmouth, Yale, Georgetown, Columbia, University of Michigan, Brown and Universite Paris 7-Denis Diderot. Morrison was also a New York State Governor's Arts awardee in 1986.
The YSU lecture series was established in 1966 in the memory of Leonard T. Skeggs Sr., who first came to Youngstown in 1919 as educational secretary of the YMCA. In 1924, he became general secretary of the YMCA, a position he held until his death in 1933.