Popular podcast host Dani Shapiro coming to campus Sept. 29
LEXINGTON, Ky. (Sept. 16, 2022) — On Thursday, Sept. 29, the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky will welcome bestselling author and popular podcast host Dani Shapiro to campus.
The event — sponsored by the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies (WRD) — will take place at 6 p.m. in White Hall Classroom Building, Room 102.
All students, faculty and staff are invited to attend Shapiro’s talk, “Family Secrets and the Stories We Carry.”
Shapiro’s writing is personal — focusing on her upbringing in an Orthodox Jewish community and her explorations of spirituality.
Her work has been featured in a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue and Time magazines. She has also taught at Columbia, New York University and Wesleyan University.
Shapiro is nationally known for her podcast “Family Secrets.” In its sixth season, guests share family secrets and the consequences of those secrets.
The podcast was inspired by her own memoir “Inheritance,” which tells the story of Shapiro discovering, at age 54, she was not biologically related to her beloved father following a genetic test.
“Students from across campus can learn a great deal about storytelling from her, which is essential to every profession — form agriculture to politics, health care and beyond,” Jeffrey Rice, department chair of WRD, said. “I can’t think of a profession that doesn’t employ storytelling to either create a brand, to share information, to persuade and so on.”
A sought-after speaker, Shapiro tours the country lecturing on identity and writing.
As the state’s flagship, land-grant institution, the University of Kentucky exists to advance the Commonwealth. We do that by preparing the next generation of leaders — placing students at the heart of everything we do — and transforming the lives of Kentuckians through education, research and creative work, service and health care. We pride ourselves on being a catalyst for breakthroughs and a force for healing, a place where ingenuity unfolds. It's all made possible by our people — visionaries, disruptors and pioneers — who make up 200 academic programs, a $476.5 million research and development enterprise and a world-class medical center, all on one campus.
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