University Day Keynote Session with Michelle Kuo, author of "Reading with Patrick," a true story of race, inequality and the power of literature
Tuesday, September 11
10:30 a.m.
The LaSells Stewart Center, Austin Auditorium

Join us for the University Day keynote session with Michelle Kuo, author of "Reading with Patrick," a true story of race, inequality and the power of literature. Ms. Kuo will explore how we can foster spaces where people who have radically different experiences or viewpoints come to understand and empathize with another. Her talk will explore this question in several contexts, from an alternative school for troubled students in the Mississippi Delta, to a college classroom at San Quentin Prison, and to a university in Paris. More broadly, she'll ask how we can create genuine conversations—in classrooms, in offices, and other places across campus—that reflect a spirit of curiosity and open-mindedness. Last, in a moment when the liberal arts are under attack, Ms. Kuo examine how initiatives to turn prisons into colleges illuminate the importance of the humanities and its transformative possibilities. 

Michelle Kuo teaches in the History, Law, and Society program at the American University of Paris. Her book, Reading with Patrick (Random House, 2017) explores education and inequality in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta. Praised by The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, it was shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice. She has written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, and Public Books. 

Prior to teaching at AUP, Michelle joined Teach for America as an English teacher in the Arkansas/Mississippi Delta corps. She taught at an alternative school for students who had been expelled from other schools. Michelle also worked as an immigrants’ rights attorney and Skadden Fellow at Centro Legal de la Raza, a nonprofit providing legal aid and deportation defense in Oakland, California. Michelle also clerked for the Honorable John T. Noonan at the Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit and volunteered at the Prison University Project, the only college-degree granting program in a California state prison. 

Michelle is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. She was awarded the American University of Paris's Board of Trustees Distinguished Teaching Award in 2016.