|
COLLEGE REUNION HONORS ALUMNAE JOAN RIVERS AND JHUMPA LAHIRI
Jhumpa Lahiri during a reading on Barnard campus, October 2003 |
Barnard honors two of its famous alumnae, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri and entertainer Joan Rivers, during College Reunion weekend June 3-6. Rivers will receive this year's Woman of Achievement Award and Lahiri will be presented with the Young Alumna Award during a gala on Saturday, June 5.
Reunion weekend features a variety of forums, programs and performances, including one by the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Please visit the Off ice of Alumnae Affairs Reunion web site for more information.
Rivers recalled in a recent interview: "I adored every minute of Barnard. It was a transitional moment for women and Barnard let you do everything."
The doyenne of red carpet fashion credits her Barnard education for helping shape who she is. A successful businesswoman—she sells a line of fragrances, jewelry, and skin-care products on the QVC channel, both nationally and internationally—Rivers is most famous for her 40-year career in show business.
She got her start on the Barnard stage. "I lived and breathed every production you could do at Barnard," she says.
Joan Rivers |
After graduation, Rivers started working the comedy circuit. By 1965, she had appeared on "The Tonight Show." She'd eventually become the first permanent guest host on the late-night program—no small feat for any comedian, let alone a female comedian. From 1987 to 1989, she hosted her own late-night talk show on Fox. From 1989 to 1994, she hosted her own daytime talk show, which won an Emmy Award. She has written five books and two Broadway plays, one of which was nominated for a Tony Award.
Rivers, who used to hang out in Greenwich Village with Woody Allen, George Carlin, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor, says she was the last of her group to break through. "Looking back, I never thought it was because I was a woman, but comedy is really a man's profession."
Lahiri, Class of 1989, has five degrees, two best-selling books, and a Pulitzer Prize. She is recognized worldwide for stories that let readers intimately know and relate to the cultural transitions experienced by Indian immigrants to the United States and the identity conflicts their children struggle with. Her second book and first novel, The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), is a bestseller about a boy, Gogol Ganguli, whose pet name becomes his public name, and who feels burdened by the strangeness of it.
When Lahiri graduated from Barnard 15 years ago with a degree in English, she never thought she'd become a fiction writer who, at 33, won a Pulitzer for her first book, a collection of nine stories called Interpreter of Maladies (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999). She started out on a different track--one that led to three master's degrees and a Ph.D. in Renaissance studies from Boston University--but now she's on the syllabus more often than she creates one.
"I feel a sense of real continuity from my Barnard days," she says. She's still in New York and still close to her Barnard faculty advisor, Timea Szell. Now a mother, Lahiri says she and her freshman roommate live in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn and are "raising our children at the same time, meeting at the playground, trading baby clothes back and forth, etc."
But when she re-considers the twists of her life after Barnard, she acknowledges that her work is far different from what she thought it would be. "It was certainly an indication that years had passed when I found myself teaching, rather than taking, a class on the fourth floor of Barnard Hall." And last October she crossed campus, not holding textbooks, but carrying copies of her own book, The Namesake, from which she read at Barnard's Books Etc. author's series (See a video of her reading at www.barnard.edu/writers.
|
