Author, radio personality Sarah Vowell to deliver Alex Kreiger ’95 lecture

Sarah Siegel Guest Writer

After lending her voice to animated film, radio shows, and numerous books, writer and humorist Sarah Vowell will be giving the Alex Krieger ’95 Memorial Lecture Thursday, Feb. 15 at 8 p.m. in the Students’ Building. The parents of a student killed in a car crash during his freshman year founded the lecture series, which has brought John Irving, Tom Wolfe, and David Sedaris to campus.

As a writer and contributing editor for NPR’s This American Life, Vowell has been described as a witty radio personality able to locate and describe the complexities American life. She said in a radio essay,, “When I think about my relationship with America I feel like a battered wife—yeah he knocks me around a lot, but boy, he sure can dance.”

Vowell has published four books and is working on her fifth. Her previous books include The Partly Cloudy Patriot, a work that has earned praise from The New York Times reviewers and Death Cab for Cutie’s front-man, and Assassination Vacation, a narrative of her road trip to tourist sites commemorating the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Throughout her work, Vowell uses history to illuminate and refine ideas about current problems. She wrote in Assassination Vacation, “Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.”

But for Vowell, the past isn’t simply there as a source of one-liners about the present. Her work often focuses on an unknown or under-publicized part of the American past, such as the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee nation’s forced removal to Oklahoma under President Jackson. “I actually think of telling stories about the long dead as a way of cheating death and bringing forgotten people back to life,” she said.

Her insights have earned her regular spots on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and The Late Show with David Letterman, published pieces in The New York Times (where she subbed for columnist Maureen Dowd), The New Yorker, Time, The Village Voice, Spin, the Los Angeles Times and G.Q., among others. After hearing her on the radio, Pixar producers chose her to do the voice of Violet Parr, the disappearing daughter in The Incredibles.

Vowell will deliver a one-hour reading, followed by a question-and-answer session and book signing.