Author Judith Viorst—perhaps best known for her beloved children’s book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and many other works—will receive an honorary degree and deliver the keynote address at Goucher College’s 122nd Commencement on Friday, May 24, 2013.
Honorary degrees also will be awarded to Kwame Kwei-Armah, the artistic director of Baltimore’s Center Stage, and Laura Amy Schlitz ’77, a Newbery Award-winning children’s author and librarian at the Park School in Baltimore.
President Sanford J. Ungar will preside over the ceremony, which will begin at 10:30 a.m. on the Margaret M. Winslow Great Lawn, between the Athenaeum and Katharine and Jane Welsh Hall. For more information, visit www.goucher.edu/commencement.
Viorst is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction for children as well as adults. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, her most famous children’s book, was first published in 1972 and has since sold more than 2 million copies.
Her other children’s books include The Tenth Good Thing About Barney; The Alphabet From Z to A; and the other “Alexander” stories: Alexander, Who Used to be Rich Last Sunday, and Alexander, Who’s Not (Do You Hear Me? I Mean It!) Going to Move.
She began her career as a poet and has completed eight collections of poems for adults, including It’s Hard to Be Hip Over 30 & Other Tragedies of Married Life, When Did I Stop Being 20 & Other Injustices: Selected Poems from Single to Mid-Life, and People and Other Aggravations. Viorst’s books for adults include nonfiction psychology books such as Grown-up Marriage, Necessary Losses, and Imperfect Control.
Viorst wrote a column in Redbook for more than 25 years and has written frequently for The New York Times and The Washington Post.
She earned a B.A. in history from Rutgers University and is a graduate of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. She has lived in Washington, DC, since 1960, when she married Milton Viorst, a political writer.