Rosanne Cash to present President’s Distinguished Lecture

This event has been canceled due to COVID-19 concerns. Check back for details on a future event date.

Acclaimed singer-songwriter and author Rosanne Cash will present the fifth annual President’s Distinguished Lecture at Connecticut College. Cash will be on campus April 21.

Cash is an American music legend, a four-time Grammy award-winning artist with a career spanning over 40 years and including 15 albums and thousands of solo performances. She is also a writer and activist whose publications include a collection of stories and poems, “Bodies of Water”; an autobiographical memoir, “Composed”; and numerous essays and opinion pieces that have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Oxford-American, The Nation and many other venues.

“Cash has used her microphone strategically as a vehicle for addressing many forms of injustice,” President Katherine Bergeron said, noting Cash’s advocacy for ending gun violence in America. 

“This orientation is evident in her most recent album, ‘She Remembers Everything,’ whose narrative arc conveys the depth of her courage, conviction, and her quiet audacity in speaking truth to power.”

Cash’s creative vision has benefited arts institutions across the country. She has served as an artist-in-residence or a programming adviser at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, San Francisco Jazz, the Minnesota Congress and The Library of Congress. Among her many accolades, she was awarded the Screen Actors Guild?American Federation of Television and Radio Artists Lifetime Achievement award for Sound Recordings in 2012; in 2014, she received the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award in the Performing Arts; and, in 2015, she was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters’ Hall of Fame.

The President’s Distinguished Lecture Series was initiated in 2016, and brings notable figures from a variety of fields and backgrounds to Connecticut College each year. The guests are invited to deliver a public presentation to an audience of the College and local communities, and then engage in informal discussions and meetings with students, faculty and staff.

Cash’s visit on April 21 will include formal and informal discussions with students, faculty and staff during the day and a reception and a book/CD signing in Evans Hall. The main event, at 7 p.m., will be an on-stage interview with Cash about the many facets of her career.