Dan Barry Coming to St. Bona's

Dan Barry, a New York Times columnist and distinguished alumnus of St. Bonaventure University, will be on campus from Feb. 9-20 as the Lenna Endowed Visiting Professor.

Barry will be speaking at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 11, in Dresser Auditorium located in the John J. Murphy Professional Building. During his visit, Barry will give various classroom and campus lectures and an open address at Jamestown Community College, in that city, the morning of Wednesday, Feb 18.

Barry graduated in 1980 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism and mass communication and was named the 1994 Alumnus of the Year. He is the author of “This Land,” a well-read weekly feature column that appears every Monday on the first page of the Times national section and takes him to every corner of the United States.

He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, the first in 1994 as an investigative reporter with the Providence Journal-Bulletin, in Rhode Island, for a series of articles about corruption in that state’s court system. His articles led to widespread judicial reform and to the criminal indictment of the state Supreme Court chief justice. He received his second Pulitzer in 2002 as a member of The New York Times team that covered the World Trade Center disaster and its aftermath.

Barry has written two books, the first titled “Pull Me Up: A Memoir,” which has been favorably compared to Frank McCourt’s best-selling “Angela’s Ashes,” and the second, which was published a year ago, titled “City Lights: Stories About New York.”

He has been described by Lee Coppola, dean of the Russell J. Jandoli School of Journalism and Mass Communication, as “the best pure writer” to come out of the school’s 60-year program, which has produced four other Pulitzer Prize winners.

Barry has received numerous awards in his career; most recently, he was given Columbia University’s coveted Mike Berger Award for in-depth human interest reporting in 2005.

Of his own writing style, Barry has said, “I try to find the small stories, stories of small and large bonds. What I’m trying to do is slow things down, to give you the chance to wrap your brain around something, to put yourself in someone else’s shoes … I just try to put a face on stories, to capture moments like they’re fireflies.”

The Lenna Endowed Visiting Professorship, established in 1990, is funded through gifts from Betty S. Lenna Fairbank and the late Reginald A. Lenna of Jamestown. It is designed to bring scholars of stature in their field to St. Bonaventure and Jamestown Community College for public lectures.