Grawemeyer Award winners to give public talks

Recipients of the 2016 Grawemeyer Award will discuss their winning works at the University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in April.

UofL presents the annual prizes for outstanding works in music composition, ideas improving world order, psychology and education and gives a religion prize jointly with Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. This year’s awards are $100,000 each.

The schedule for the 2016 Grawemeyer Awards Lecture Series, which is free and open to the public, is as follows:

• Steven Maier, distinguished professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the Center for Neuroscience at University of Colorado-Boulder, will present “Behavioral Control, Resilience, and the Medial Prefrontal Cortex” on April 13 at 12 noon in the Middleton Auditorium Room 101, Strickler Hall. He won the psychology award for discovering a brain mechanism that not only produces resilience to trauma but also aids in coping with future adversity.

• Education award recipients Karl Alexander and Linda Olson will speak April 13 at 5 p.m. in the University Club Ballroom. They and their late colleague, Doris Entwisle, were recognized for their book, “The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood,” which details their decades-long study of urban youths. All three authors were employed at Johns Hopkins University.

• Susan R. Holman, senior writer at the Global Health Education and Learning Incubator at Harvard University, will present “Health Justice—Hermeneutic of Blessing?” on April 13 at 7 p.m. in the seminary’s Caldwell Chapel. She received the religion award for her book, “Beholden: Religion, Global Health, and Human Rights,” in which she examines how faith-based and human rights organizations’ divergent ideological approaches can undermine efforts to address global health issues.

• Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros, authors of “The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence,” will speak April 14 at 1 p.m. in the Ekstrom Library’s Chao Auditorium. They received the award for Ideas Improving World Order for outlining how the absence of law enforcement in developing countries undermines the fight against global poverty. Haugen is founder and president of the International Justice Mission. Boutros is a visiting scholar at George Washington University Law School.

• On April 14 at 3 p.m. in UofL School of Music’s Bird Hall, Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen will talk about “let me tell you,” a song cycle for soprano and orchestra that earned him the 2016 music composition award. Librettist Paul Griffiths and Abrahamsen’s wife, pianist Ann-Marie Abildskov, also will participate to highlight the winning piece, which presents a first-person narrative by Shakespeare’s Ophelia.

UofL graduate and philanthropist Charles Grawemeyer created the awards program in 1984 to pay tribute to the power of creative thought and emphasize the impact a single idea can have on the world. Grawemeyer further distinguished the awards by requiring the selection process involve a lay committee to ensure the winning ideas are comprehensible to a broad audience. The Grawemeyer Awards celebrated its 30th anniversary last fall with a series of special events, including the naming of boxing legend and humanitarian Muhammad Ali as the first recipient of the Grawemeyer Spirit Award.