Author Deborah Baker to read at CSB

Author Deborah Baker will read from her book, "The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism," at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 5 in the Gorecki Family Theater, Benedicta Arts Center of the College of Saint Benedict, St. Joseph, Minn.

She will be in residence at CSB from Dec. 3-6, visiting classes and spending time with students.

Baker was raised in Charlottesville, Va.; Puerto Rico and New England. She attended both the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. and the University of Cambridge. Baker's first biography was published in 1982, while she was still a college student. She worked as a book editor and publisher for a number of years, and then moved to Kolkata, India.

While living in Calcutta, Baker wrote "In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding," which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1994. From 2008-09, she was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis C. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at The New York Public Library, where she researched and wrote "The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism," which focuses on the life of a young American woman who decides to convert to Islam. "The Convert" was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in non-fiction and received the 2012 Sister Mariella Gable Prize, awarded by CSB, which honors an important literary work published by Graywolf Press, a collaborative partner of CSB.

This reading is part of the Warner Reading Series of the Manitou Fund, a long-standing supporter of CSB and the Literary Arts Institute in particular. The Manitou Fund has sponsored readings and presentations at the CSB for over two decades and established the Sister Mariella Series, which is formed by each of the individual award winners of the Sister Mariella Gable Award.

In addition to the reading at CSB, Baker will read at 7 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 6 at Common Good Books, 38 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul, Minn.

Both events are free and open to the public. For more information, contact Mark Conway at [email protected].

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