The award-winning journalist and founder of The Race Card Project will speak at Elon on January 10, 2017.
Award-winning journalist Michele Norris will deliver the Martin Luther King Keynote Address on Jan. 10, 2017, in McCrary Theatre. She is founder of The Race Card Project and the author of “The Grace of Silence,” a look at how America talks about race.
In 2013, Norris was named host and special correspondent for NPR. While on sabbatical, Norris spent a time traveling the country and developing two successful initiatives: The Race Card Project and NPR’s Backseat Book Club. Her new role will allow her to continue this work while producing in-depth segments for all NPR programs.
Before joining NPR, she served as a correspondent for ABC News, where she reported extensively on education, inner-city issues, the national drug problem, and poverty. While at ABC, she earned an Emmy Award and Peabody Award for her contribution to the network’s coverage of 9/11.
In her 2010 book, “The Grace of Silence: A Memoir,” Norris focuses on how America talks about race in the wake of the Obama presidential election, and explores her own family’s racial legacy. Tom Brokaw says the memoir makes her personal story a universal one: “Michele Norris takes us on a riveting personal journey from north to south and back again through the tangled landscape of race in America — and teaches anew about the pain and possibilities of our past and future.” It was named one of the year’s best books by The Christian Science Monitor.
Tickets for the Martin Luther King event will be available in late November.