Toni Morrison Selected to Receive the 2016 Emerson-Thoreau Medal

Toni Morrison, the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, Emerita at Princeton University in New Jersey, has been selected to receive the 2016 Emerson-Thoreau Medal by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The award was established in 1958 and recognizes lifetime achievement in literature. Professor Morrison will be honored at a ceremony in April in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Toni Morrison was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for her novel Beloved. In 1993, she was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2012, Professor Morrison was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her latest novel is God Help the Child (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015).

Professor Morrison joined the faculty at Princeton in 1989. Previously, she taught at the University at Albany of the State University of New York System and had been an editor at Random House for 20 years.