electronic pdf version - Westminster College

Featured Speakers
Paul Berliner
Ensemble.
Paul Berliner is Arts and Sciences Professor of Music,
Department of Music and John Hope Franklin Center for
International and Interdisciplinary Studies, at Duke
University. He is the award-winning author of - The Soul of
Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People of
Zimbabwe, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of
Improvisation, and a solo multimedia theatre piece about the
plight of artists during Zimbabwe’s liberation
struggle, Library in Flames: A Tale of Musicians in a Time of
War. A forty-year associate of African mbira masters,
he recorded and produced the CDs Zimbabwe: Shona Mbira
Music and Zimbabwe: The Soul of Mbira (Nonesuch Records)
and has performed internationally with the Paul Winter
Consort and the Zimbabwean groups, Mhuri
yekwaRwizi and the Zimbabwe Group Leaders Mbira
He holds teaching awards from Northwestern University; received an honorary degree, Doctor of
Humane Letters, from DePaul University in Chicago in 2003; and was elected to the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.
Aron Ralston
Outdoor adventurer, public speaker, outdoor photographer,
mountain guide, film consultant, and wilderness advocate,
Aron Ralston will speak at the plenary Saturday.
Aron’s memoir, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, tells the
miraculous story of perseverance and a family’s love that has
touched and inspired readers around the world. He interweaves
adventures and misadventures in his development as an
outdoorsman with the saga of his six-day-long entrapment by
an 800-pound boulder in Blue John Canyon, which ended in
him amputating his right hand and forearm with a blunted
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