Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author Frank McCourt To Speak with Freshmen at Brooklyn College

Frank McCourt, ’67.

Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes, will visit Brooklyn College on Thursday, September 9, at 1:30 p.m. in Gershwin Theater to speak with incoming students about his experiences as a young man newly arrived in New York City, as a Brooklyn College student and as a mature man writing his memoir.

McCourt will appear as part of the “Telling Our Stories/Sharing Our Lives” program starting this fall at the College. The new program is part of the City University of New York’s CUE Initiative (Coordinated Undergraduate Education), an effort to help ease students’ transition into college and enrich their college experience. All incoming students received copies of Angela’s Ashes when they registered for classes and will write their own short narratives about their lives.

The Brooklyn-born McCourt was tapped to speak to the students because of his own experience as a Brooklyn College student. Though McCourt was born in Brooklyn, he spent his childhood in Limerick, Ireland. After returning to the United States he settled in the Brooklyn Heights and Boerum Hill neighborhoods and taught at New York City Technical College and Stuyvesant High School. He received his master’s degree in English from Brooklyn College in 1967.

Angela's Ashes won the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 1997 and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996. It was made into a film in 1999 starring Robert Carlyle and Emily Watson. A sequal to the book, 'Tis, chronicled McCourt's return to the United States as a young man.