The One Hundred and Nineteenth Annual Dinner
In Celebration of the Signet Society's 140th Year
- Speaker: Tad Friend ‘84
Tad Friend is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He has written previously for Vogue, Esquire, New York, and Outside and has had his articles published in The Best American Sports Writing and The Utne Reader's "Good Life," among other collections. He lives in New York City. Friend's memoir, Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor, was published by Little, Brown in September, 2009.
- Medalist: Jill Abramson '76
Jill Abramson is the managing editor of The New York Times. She is the co-author, with Jane Mayer, of Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, and authored Where They Are Now: The Story of the Women of Harvard Law 1974.
- Toastmaster: Susan Stevenson Borowitz ‘81
Susan Stevenson Borowitz is a television writer, humorist, and co-creator of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
- Poet: Donald Platt
Donald Platt (Ph.D., University of Utah, 1995) is the author of four volumes of poetry: Dirt Angels (New Issues Press in 2009), My Father Says Grace (Arkansas University Press, 2007), Cloud Atlas (Purdue University Press, 2002), and Fresh Peaches, Fireworks, & Guns (Purdue University Press, 1994). His poems have appeared in many journals, including The New Republic, Nation, Paris Review, Poetry, Kenyon Review, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2000 and 2006 and in The Pushcart Prize XXVII and XXIX (the 2003 and 2005 editions). He is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paumanok Poetry Prize, the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, two Verna Emery Poetry Prizes, and the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize. Platt is a full professor in Purdue University’s English Department, where he offers courses in the writing of poetry at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
More details forthcoming…