As the culminating event for the 2023-24 Campus Read, Yaa Gyasi, author of “Transcendent Kingdom,” will discuss the novel and its themes of faith, science, religion and love at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 14, in the Mountainlair Ballrooms.
Gyasi was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize.
“Transcendent Kingdom” is a New York Times Bestseller and was a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and her debut novel “Homegoing” was a winner at the 2017 Audie Awards.
The event is sponsored by the Dan and Betsy Brown Lecture Series and the Honors College. The Browns created the lecture series with a generous gift to WVU in 2002.
Dan Brown is a 1959 graduate of the John Chambers College of Business and Economics and Betsy Brown is a 1959 graduate of the then Davis College of Agriculture, Forestry and Consumer Sciences.
The Browns’ support of WVU has included establishing The Brown Family Faculty Development Fund, the WVU Marching Band’s state-of-the-art rehearsal tower, and photography and computer-assisted design labs at the Creative Arts Center. They also have donated to funds supporting Mountaineer Athletics, the University’s Adventure West Virginia program, the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute and renovations at Blaney House, home of the University's president.