April
28, 2005
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Author
and Nobel Prize Winner Toni Morrison is
Ramapo College’s
Commencement Speaker
(Mahwah) – Author, professor and Nobel Prize-winner
Toni Morrison will deliver the commencement address at Ramapo
College of New Jersey’s 2005 ceremony Wednesday, May
25. She will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters
degree. The ceremony is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m.
Toni
Morrison was appointed Robert F. Goheen
Professor in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University
in 1989. She
has held teaching posts at Yale, Bard College
and Rutgers University and was a senior
editor at Random House for 20 years. She earned degrees from
Howard and Cornell Universities.
Her eight major novels, The Bluest Eye, Song of
Solomon, Sula, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise and Love,
received extensive critical acclaim. She received the
national Book Critics Award in 1978 for Song of Solomon and
the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. She also
has co-authored children’s books and published books
of essays.
Morrison
has received prestigious awards including: the
2000 National Humanities Medal, the 2000
Library of Congress Bicentennial Living
Legend Award, the 1996 National Book Foundation Medal for
Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Pearl
Buck Award (1994), the Sara Lee Corporation Front Runner
Award in the Arts (1989), the Anisfield Wolf Book Award in
Race Relations (1988) and the Distinguished
Writer Award of 1978 from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1993, Morrison was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature. She holds honorary degrees
from a number of higher learning institutions including Georgetown,
Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth and Ecole Normale Supérieure,
Oberlin and Yale.
The
College’s President’s Award of Merit will
be awarded posthumously to Dan Cronin, who graduated from Ramapo
College in 1984. While serving in the Navy in 1966, Cronin
suffered a severe injury that left him paralyzed from the waist
down. “Dan lived a good portion of his life in
a wheelchair,” remembers a friend, “but I never
ceased to be amazed by how well he got around -- in snow, in
every kind of weather, and in every sort of neighborhood --
nothing held him back.” In 1980 Cronin enrolled
at Ramapo College, received a degree in 1984,
and continued his education at Seton Hall
University where he earned a degree in law.
He
then began a career in poverty and family
law, serving as an attorney for Bergen County Legal Services. Among
the many honors he received were the New Jersey Certificate
of Appreciation for Meritorious Public Service for his work
as a member of the Supreme Court’s District Ethics Committee,
a Certificate of Appreciation from Shelter
Our Sisters, a home for victims of domestic
violence, and the Outstanding Attorney of the Year award from
Legal Services of New Jersey.
