Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Kevin Roose joins the 2010 President's Forum Series at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

On Wednesday, April 7, 21 year old writer and college student Kevin Roose will join the President’s Forum series with a lecture at 7:30 p.m. in the Geneva Room in the Warren Hunting Smith Library.

Roose was born in Oberlin, Ohio, a liberal college town plopped down improbably in the middle of the Lake Erie Rust Belt. Before becoming an author, he held down various part-time jobs, including working as a tennis camp counselor, a juice bar barista, and a biblical slave (long story).

During his sophomore year at Brown University, he met a group of students from Liberty University, the late Reverend Jerry Falwell’s "Bible Boot Camp" for young evangelicals. Inspired by that meeting, he decided to leave Brown and spend a semester "abroad" at Liberty, learning about his conservative Christian peers by living among them. He chronicled his experiences in "THE UNLIKELY DISCIPLE: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University," which was published in March 2009 by Grand Central Publishing.

Since returning to Brown, Roose has continued writing for national publications like Esquire, SPIN, and mental_floss, on topics as wide-ranging as barbershop quartets, 19th-century magicians, and cell-phone ringtones. He is a staff writer for the College Hill Independent, a regular columnist for the Brown Daily Herald, and a Rose Writing Fellow. In 2008, he was given a Royce Fellowship for his journalism, and barring an act of God, he will graduate from Brown in 2009 with an English degree. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

For more information, visit Roose's website.

This information is accurate for the time period that this person(s) spoke at Hobart and William Smith.