RIT Brings Author Colson Whitehead to Campus for "Common Novel" Experience

Students across the Rochester Institute of Technology campus are reading award-winning author Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist in this year’s Common Novel program, sponsored by RIT’s Department of Language and Literature. Whitehead will talk about his novel at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 30, in Webb Auditorium in the James E. Booth Building.

The author won the Whiting Writers’ Award (2000), a New York Public Library Young Lion’s Fiction Award (2002), and the Black Caucus Literary Award (2002).

The Intuitionist, an Ernest Hemingway/PEN Award finalist, is the "common novel" being read this academic year by all RIT students enrolled in Writing and Literature I, a core requirement for undergraduates.

Whitehead’s second novel, John Henry Days, recently won a MacArthur Fellowship, and an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The novel also was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

The event is free and open to the public.