Wil Haygood—a renowned journalist, author, and movie producer—will be the keynote speaker at Goucher’s graduate programs Commencement held on Sunday, August 2, at 3 p.m. in Kraushaar Auditorium. The ceremony will honor the achievements of the graduates enrolled in programs through the Robert S. Welch Center for Graduate and Professional Studies at Goucher College.
For nearly three decades, Haygood was a journalist. He served as a national and foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe, where he covered the prison release in South Africa of anti-apartheid legend Nelson Mandela and the civil wars in Liberia and Somalia, where he was even taken hostage before being rescued by Pakistani troops. For his work at The Globe, Haygood won more than a dozen national journalism honors and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
In 2002, he joined The Washington Post as a national writer. He covered the 2008 presidential campaign of then-Senator Barack Obama. It was at The Post that Haygood wrote the page-one story “A Butler Well Served by this Election,” the sweeping life story of long-serving White House butler Eugene Allen, who worked for eight presidential administrations.
The story was adapted into the blockbuster motion picture The Butler directed by Academy Award nominated director Lee Daniels and starring, among others, Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, Robin Williams, and Cuba Gooding Jr. Haygood served as associate producer of the film.
Haygood is also the author of Two on the River, about his 2,500-mile journey down the Mississippi River; King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (a New York Times notable book); The Haygoods of Columbus: A Family Memoir (winner of the Great Lakes Book Award); In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Jr. (winner of the Book of the Year Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and now being developed as a motion picture); Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson (finalist for the first-ever PEN-ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award and now being developed as a motion picture); and The Butler: A Witness to History, which became a New York Times bestseller that has been translated into a dozen foreign languages.
His forthcoming book, Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America, will be published this October. For his work on the Marshall book, Haygood won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.
Haygood will also deliver the Patsy Sims Lecture in Nonfiction during the residency of the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program on Friday, July 31. The lecture is named in honor of the program’s longtime director who retired last year. Haygood has long been involved with the the Creative Nonfiction program and has spoken at its residencies several times, the most recent in January 2014.
The Robert S. Welch Center for Graduate and Professional Studies at Goucher College offers 10 master’s degree programs, including five programs offered in low-residency, distance learning formats. The limited-residency programs are a Master of Arts in Arts Administration, Master of Arts in Cultural Sustainability, Master of Arts in Digital Arts, Master of Fine Arts in Digital Arts, Master of Arts in Environmental Studies, Master of Arts in Historic Preservation, Master of Arts in Management, and Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction. Many of these programs are also offered as part of dual-degree programs, in which students may earn two master’s degrees at once.
Additionally, the Welch Center offers a Master of Education program that allows students to specialize in athletic programs and leadership, education for at-risk students, middle school education, reading instruction, school mediation, school improvement leadership, and urban and diverse learners. The center’s Master of Arts in Teaching is a certification program designed to prepare graduates with no teaching background for careers in elementary, middle, or special education.