Emmy Award-Winning Professor, Cherry Award Finalist Lectures at Baylor

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Emmy Award winner Dr. Roger Rosenblatt will present "Tell Me a Story: Why We Talk to Each Other" at 4 p.m. Monday, Oct. 5, in Baylor University's Armstrong Browning Library.

Rosenblatt, Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University, is one of three outstanding scholar/teachers from U.S. universities who have been selected as finalists for the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, the single largest award given to an individual for exceptional teaching.

The other finalists are Dr. Edward B. Burger, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Gaudino Scholar at Williams College, and Dr. Elliott West, Alumni Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. All three of the Cherry Award finalists will present a series of lectures at Baylor in October.

Rosenblatt said he will discuss why people create stories, why people educate each other on stories and why people base law, medicine and business on stories.

The winner of the Cherry Award will receive $200,000 and teach in residence at Baylor University during the 2010 fall semester or 2011 spring semester. Baylor University will also give the winner's home department $25,000.

"I hope [my former students will] remember what I taught them--the most important thing is to treat each other decently and to be useful in the world," Rosenblatt said.

Nominations for the Cherry Award are made by colleagues and current and former students. A committee reviews the nominations before selecting the finalists, said Linda McGregor, program coordinator of the Cherry Award.

Rosenblatt is the author of more than 300 articles, six plays and 12 books, including Black Fiction; Children of War; Life Itself; Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969; Anything Can Happen; Lapham Rising; Bee and Making Toast: A Family Story.
Rosenblatt's awards and honors includes the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, two George Foster Peabody Awards, a Fulbright Scholarship to Ireland, five honorary doctorates, two George Polk Awards for journalism and an Emmy Award for his essays on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, a program on PBS.
"I don't think of myself as someone who achieves things," he said. "I try to do well with the tasks at hand, to family, friends, students, readers and my work."
Rosenblatt earned his bachelor's degree from New York University and his master's degree and doctorate in American literature from Harvard University.

For more information, visit www.baylor.edu/cherry_awards. Armstrong Browning Library is located at 710 Speight Ave.

by Colton Wright, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805