Pulitzer-prize winning author Tony Kushner canceled his Monday visit to Duke due to the unexpected death of a close family friend Sunday.
Kushner, a playwright and screenwriter who received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2013, was scheduled to speak in the Sanford School of Public Policy at 5:30 p.m. Monday. Representatives from Sanford are still in contact with Kushner's agency and hope to reschedule his visit, said Sanford spokesman Max Erdemandi.
"There's not a lot of time left to work with this semester, but we'd love to have him back next semester," Erdemandi said. "We'll continue to have conversations with his agency to find a time that works best."
Kushner was scheduled to present as part of the Crown Lecture in Ethics series, which brings speakers to Duke to address ethical issues across a variety of disciplines. Kushner's lecture was intended to focus on art and politics.
His most well-known work is a two-part play titled "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for in 1993. The play, which is about the AIDS epidemic in New York in the 1980s, was later adopted into an HBO miniseries, for which Kushner wrote the screenplay and received an Emmy Award.
He also wrote the screenplay for the 2012 film "Lincoln" and co-authored the screenplay for the 2005 film "Munich," both of which earned critical acclaim.
Previous lecturers in the Crown Lecture in Ethics Series—named for benefactor Lester Crown—include Pulitzer Prize-winning author and conservationist Jared Diamond, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jody Williams and award-winning science writer Rebecca Skloot.
Though Crown does not personally have Duke connections, several members of his family are alumni, including his daughter Paula Crown, Trinity '80 and a current member of the Board of Trustees.
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