NOVEMBER 30: WES MOORE
Rosemont College is pleased to announce a special lecture with author Wes Moore on Wednesday, November 30, 2011. This free event, to be held at 7:30 p.m. in McShain Performing Arts Center, will be open to students, faculty, staff, alumni, and members of the public. Moore, who served a combat tour of duty in Afghanistan and as a White House fellow, was recently hailed as a member of “The New Greatest Generation” by Time magazine.
Moore’s
The Other Wes Moore (
Spiegel & Grau, 2010) is this semester’s shared reading for all first-year Rosemont students. The book’s inspiration came a decade before its release, when a story about Moore receiving The Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University ran in his hometown newspaper
The Baltimore Sun. Around the same time, the paper covered the arrests of four men for the murder of an off-duty police officer during an armed robbery. One of those eventually convicted was also named Wes Moore.
The two men’s personal histories became the basis for The Other Wes Moore. The author recounts that like the other Wes, he struggled in school and was in trouble with the police in his preteen years. Their paths diverge when Moore’s mother sends him to Valley Forge Military Academy, where the author spent six years. Moore went on to graduate Phi Beta Kappa from Johns Hopkins University with a bachelor’s degree in international relations and earned a master’s of letters from Oxford.
A paratrooper and Captain in the United States Army, Moore served in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2006 with the 1st brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division. When he returned, he spent a year working on Wall Street and another year at the White House as Special Assistant to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Today, he continues to explore how mentoring, education, and public service affect the lives of young Americans. He established an organization with Johns Hopkins to help troubled Baltimore youths called STAND! He also serves on the boards of trustees for Johns Hopkins University, Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE- Baltimore), Phi Theta Kappa, and Iraq Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA).
Moore was a featured speaker at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. He has appeared on shows ranging from “Oprah,” to “Meet the Press,” to “CBS Sunday Morning,” to NPR’s “All Things Considered.” He currently lives in New York with his wife, Dawn, and their daughter.