This event has been moved to Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall.

Join us on Monday, October 3, at 8 pm, for the 52nd annual Steloff Lecture delivered by writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie will lecture on The Writer In The World, respond to audience questions, and be awarded of an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. She will sign books following the presentation.

About Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in 1977 in Nigeria to an Igbo family and moved to the United States to complete her graduate education at Yale and at the Johns Hopkins University. Her award-winning novels include Americanah (2013 National Book Critics Circle Award), Half of a Yellow Sun (2007 Orange Prize) and Purple Hibiscus (2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize). She is the recipient of many other awards, including a 2008 MacArthur Genius Grant. Her non-fiction works include We Should All Be Feminists (2014) and a June 2021 essay, “It Is Obscene,” a critique of “cancel culture.”

The London Times Literary Supplement wrote of Adichie in 2018: “The most prominent of a precession of critically acclaimed young Anglophone authors….attracting a new generation of readers to African literature.”

About the Steloff Lecture

Skidmore’s annual Frances Steloff Lecture honors the work of a major literary figure. The Steloff Lecture series was established in 1967 at Skidmore by Frances Steloff, a native of Saratoga Springs, founder of the Gotham Book Mart in New York City, and well-known patron of writers. She endowed the lecture series as a way to bring outstanding literary and artistic talent to the college. Notable Steloff speakers have included five Nobel Prize winners and dozens of the world’s most important writers. Previous Steloff honorees include Mario Vargas Llosa, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, J.M. Coetzee, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson, John Banville, and Joyce Carol Oates, among many others.

The Steloff Lecture is presented by the English Department at Skidmore College and is free and open to the public.