Hamilton, NY — The writer Susan Brind Morrow will read from her memoir, The Names of Things: A Passage in the Egyptian Desert (Riverhead Books, 1997) at Colgate University on Wednesday, March 21. The reading, which will take place at 4:30 p.m. in the Ho Lecture Room, Lawrence Hall, is free and open to the public. Co-sponsors include the Olive B. O’Connor Visiting Lecture Fund, the Division of the Humanities, Friends of the Colgate University Libraries, the environmental studies program and the Department of English.
Morrow, a native of this state’s Finger Lakes Region, spent time as an archaeologist in Egypt with the Dakhleh Oasis Project in the Western Desert in the early 1980s. She continued to travel and work in Egypt and the Sudan throughout the ’80s. As a Northeast Africa fellow of the Crane-Rogers Foundation from 1988-90 she lived with the nomadic tribes on the Red Sea coast, studying their perception of nature and its influence on language. The Names of Things: A Passage in the Egyptian Desert, is her first book, and was a finalist for the Pen/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir in 1998. Morrow has translated contemporary Arabic poetry and has written for Harper’s Magazine and The Nation. Currently she is at work on her second narrative book, Wolves and Honey, a memoir of New York State, among other projects.
Founded in 1819, Colgate University is a nationally ranked, highly selective, residential, liberal arts college. Situated on a rolling 515-acre campus in central New York State, Colgate University attracts motivated students with diverse backgrounds, interests and talents.