September 30, 2021
Dear Members of the Connecticut College Community,
I am writing to invite you to our next President’s Distinguished Lecture with acclaimed singer-songwriter and author Rosanne Cash. She will be speaking in Evans Hall Tuesday, Oct. 26, at 7 p.m.
Cash is an American music legend, a four-time Grammy award-winning artist with a career spanning over 40 years and including 15 albums and thousands of solo performances. She is also a writer and activist whose publications include a collection of stories and poems, “Bodies of Water”; an autobiographical memoir, “Composed”; and numerous essays and opinion pieces that have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Oxford-American, The Nation, and many other venues.
In both her music and her prose, Cash has been one of country music’s most outspoken advocates for ending gun violence in America. She has served on the board of directors of PAX, an organization that has since become part of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, while using her microphone to address many forms of injustice. This commitment is evident in her 2018 album, “She Remembers Everything,” whose narrative arc conveys her quiet audacity in speaking truth to power.
Cash has served as an artist-in-residence or a programming adviser at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, San Francisco Jazz, the Minnesota Orchestra, and The Library of Congress. Among her many accolades, she was awarded in 2012 the Screen Actors Guild?American Federation of Television and Radio Artists Lifetime Achievement award for Sound Recordings. In 2014, she received the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award in the Performing Arts. In 2015, she was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters’ Hall of Fame. And this past August, she was awarded the 61st Edward MacDowell Medal for her outstanding contributions to the field of music composition.
Her visit to Connecticut College will include discussions with students along with the main event at 7 p.m.: an on-stage interview about music, poetry, activism, and the many ways to use one’s voice. All COVID protocols will be followed.
I look forward to seeing you there.
Yours,
Katherine Bergeron
President