Author Ron Hansen to speak at Commencement
Sara Cesky
Issue date: 4/28/09 Section: News
Ron Hansen, distinguished author and Santa Clara University professor, has been chosen to give the commencement address at Loyola's 157th commencement exercises on Saturday, May 16, to be held at Baltimore's 1st Mariner Arena.
Mr. Hansen went to a Jesuit high school and holds a bachelor's degree from Creighton University, also a Jesuit institution, which is in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. He then spent two years as a lieutenant in the army during the Vietnam War.
After leaving the army he earned his MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa. He later held a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University. He is currently the Gerard Manley Hopkins professor in the Arts and Humanities department at Santa Clara, where he earned an M.A. in Spirituality.
He teaches courses such as Fiction Writing, Screenwriting, Writing in the Community, The Bible as Literature, Contemporary Literature, and The 20th Century American Short Story.
Mr. Hansen has written numerous books, including Exiles, where he focused on 19th century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Mariette in Ecstasy, which earned the fiction prize from the Bay Area Reviewers Association and the Gold Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California.
His other honors include a National Book Award nomination for Atticus, which is about the bond between a father and son who died mysteriously in a Mexican town, as well as several PEN/Faulkner Award nominations. He frequently writes about the Old West, mixing history with morality and drama.
He has also received fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Lyndhurst Foundation and was presented with an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
In addition to being an accomplished author, he is also an ordained deacon of the Catholic Church and has published a compilation of essays on faith and fiction and the children's book, The Shadowmaker.
Mr. Hansen went to a Jesuit high school and holds a bachelor's degree from Creighton University, also a Jesuit institution, which is in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. He then spent two years as a lieutenant in the army during the Vietnam War.
After leaving the army he earned his MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa. He later held a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University. He is currently the Gerard Manley Hopkins professor in the Arts and Humanities department at Santa Clara, where he earned an M.A. in Spirituality.
He teaches courses such as Fiction Writing, Screenwriting, Writing in the Community, The Bible as Literature, Contemporary Literature, and The 20th Century American Short Story.
Mr. Hansen has written numerous books, including Exiles, where he focused on 19th century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Mariette in Ecstasy, which earned the fiction prize from the Bay Area Reviewers Association and the Gold Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California.
His other honors include a National Book Award nomination for Atticus, which is about the bond between a father and son who died mysteriously in a Mexican town, as well as several PEN/Faulkner Award nominations. He frequently writes about the Old West, mixing history with morality and drama.
He has also received fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Lyndhurst Foundation and was presented with an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
In addition to being an accomplished author, he is also an ordained deacon of the Catholic Church and has published a compilation of essays on faith and fiction and the children's book, The Shadowmaker.
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