Release date: April 4, 2002
Contact: Deb Hammacher, Associate Director, Media Relations,
at 404-727-0644 or dhammac@emory.edu

Playwright Alfred Uhry Chosen as 2002 Commencement Speaker

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Atlanta native Alfred Uhry will serve as keynote speaker for Emory University's 157th commencement May 13. He also will receive an honorary doctor of humane letters degree during the ceremony.

Uhry is best known as the author of "Driving Miss Daisy," a play he wrote based on his grandmother that garnered the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for drama. He received two Academy Awards the following year for best picture and best screenplay adaptation for the movie version of his work.

Uhry grew up in Druid Hills, the neighborhood surrounding Emory, in which both the house used in the film and the house where the real Miss Daisy had lived are located. After graduating from Brown University, he began working in New York City in 1960 as a playwright, lyricist and teacher.

Uhry's successes after "Driving Miss Daisy" include the 1997 Tony Award for best play for "The Last Night of Ballyhoo," commissioned by the Cultural Olympiad for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, and 1999 Tony Awards for best book and best music for "Parade," based on the Leo Frank lynching story.

Emory President William M. Chace collaborated with the several student groups in selecting Uhry as keynote speaker. The Honorary Degree Committee also selected four additional honorary degree recipients: mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot, World Bank managing director Mamphela Ramphele, and Vietnam My Lai massacre heroes Hugh Thompson and Larry Colburn.

"Alfred Uhry is a native son, having grown up literally in Emory's backyard. In his work as a Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, he has dealt with the most sensitive racial themes with great dignity and personal integrity. It is fitting that this thoughtful creative artist should address the university at commencement," says Chace.

Among Uhry's many works is "The Robber Bridegroom," a two-act musical based on Eudora Welty's novella of the same title, produced in 1975. In 1988, he wrote the screenplay for "Mystic Pizza."

Uhry has donated his own literary archive to Emory's Woodruff Library Special Collections, and since 1996 he has been on the advisory board of the Playwriting Center at Theater Emory.

For more information on Alfred Uhry and other honorary degree recipients, please visit www.emory.edu/COMMENCEMENT/honorary_degrees.html

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