Duke will award five honorary degrees during its May 11 commencement ceremony, President Richard Brodhead announced Thursday.
The recipients will be writers Barbara Kingsolver and Wendell Berry, public health leader Dr. Helene Gayle, broadcast executive James Goodmon and Court of Appeals Judge Patricia Wald.
"Honorary degrees serve the dual purpose of recognizing extraordinary individuals and inspiring graduating students," Brodhead said in a statement. "Students about to embark on their own careers, full of hope and promise, see at commencement these wonderful examples of how they might put their own learning to use in the future."
Kingsolver, who was recently billed as the University's commencement speaker, is the author of "The Poisonwood Bible" released in 1998 and "Animal Dreams" in 1990.
"Duke University is an exciting community of scholars with an outstanding history and tradition," she wrote in an e-mail. "I am honored that they have invited me through those gates."
She wrote her most recent book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life," with her husband Steven Hopp and daughter Camille Kingsolver, a Duke junior. The book chronicles the family's first year as "locavores," eating only food grown by themselves or local farmers in southwestern Virginia.
Berry, an essayist, poet and author of more than 40 books, has previously been honored with fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Rockefeller foundations as well as a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing advocates environmental protection and draws upon his experiences living on a farm in Kentucky.
Gayle is Chief Executive Officer and president of CARE, a humanitarian group that fights global poverty, and the first woman and black person to lead the organization's global poverty reduction efforts. She was named in 2006 as one of "The 50 Women to Watch" by the Wall Street Journal.
Goodmon serves as president and chief executive officer of the Capitol Broadcasting Company and as owner of several North Carolina radio and TV stations, including WRAL. The company played a major role in the development of the American Historic Tobacco District in downtown Durham, transforming the old American Tobacco warehouse into a retail and office complex.
He attended Duke from 1961 to 1965 but left to enlist in the Navy before receiving a degree.
Wald served from 1979 to 1999 as the first woman judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and later rose to the position of chief judge.
President George W. Bush previously appointed Wald to the Iraq Intelligence Commission, which was set up in 2004 to investigate U.S. intelligence on weapons of mass destruction preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
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