Pulitzer Prize Author Doris Kearns Goodwin to Give Keynote Address for UMaine Leadership Week

World-renowned historian Doris Kearns Goodwin will deliver the keynote address for University of Maine Leadership Week on April 18 at the Collins Center for the Arts.

Her 7 p.m. talk, “Team of Rivals: Leadership Lessons from Abraham Lincoln,” is free and open to the public.

UMaine’s Leadership Week, April 11-19, features academic activities, student research expositions and campuswide celebration commemorating the inauguration of University of Maine President Paul W. Ferguson on April 19.

Leadership will be the focus of President Ferguson’s inaugural address and the theme of a number of Leadership Week events, including Goodwin’s keynote. All Leadership Week events are free and open to the public.

“I am so pleased that Doris Kearns Goodwin is joining us for Leadership Week,” says President Ferguson. “Like many people across our country and world, I have been a fan and student of her work for many years. Her insightful scholarship, quality of storytelling and personal warmth bring each of her subjects to life for us in a very tangible way. Her clear strength as a historian and observer of the political scene is to facilitate our current understanding by highlighting leadership lessons of the past. Doris Kearns Goodwin will bring great value and enjoyment to our celebration of leadership at the University of Maine and I am deeply touched and honored that she will be a part of the Inauguration activities.”

Goodwin has been reporting on politics and baseball for more than two decades. She is the author of several books and has written for leading national publications. She appears regularly on network television programs and was an on-air consultant for PBS documentaries on Lyndon B. Johnson, the Kennedy family, Franklin Roosevelt and Ken Burns’ The History of Baseball. Goodwin also was the first female journalist to enter the Red Sox locker room. Goodwin was born and raised on Long Island, New York.

A Colby College graduate, Goodwin received her Ph.D. in government from Harvard University and taught there before serving as an assistant to Lyndon Johnson in his last year in the White House. She later assisted Johnson in the preparation of his memoirs.

In 1976, Goodwin authored “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream,” which became a New York Times best seller. She followed up in 1987 with the political biography, “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,” which stayed on the New York Times Best-Seller list for five months. In 1990, it was made into a six-hour ABC miniseries.

Her next book, “No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Home Front During World War II,” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in April 1995, as well as the Harold Washington Literary Award, the New England Bookseller Association Award, the Ambassador Book Award and the Washington Monthly Book Award. It was a New York Times best seller for six months. Goodwin’s book, “Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir,” published in 1997, is about growing up in the 1950s in love with the Brooklyn Dodgers. It has been a New York Times best seller, as well as a Book of the Month Club selection.

Her most recent work, a monumental history of Abraham Lincoln, “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” published in October 2005, joined the best-seller lists on its first week in publication, and soon reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best-Seller list. The book won the 2006 Lincoln Prize for an outstanding work about the president and/or the Civil War, the New York Historical Society Book Prize, the Richard Nelson Current Award and the New York State Archives History Makers Award.