News Release

January 16, 2024
For more information, contact:
Laura Brelsford | laura.brelsford@hawks.huntingdon.edu | 334-833-4563

Huntingdon Hosts John Archibald for the Ellison Symposium

Montgomery, AL – Huntingdon College is hosting the award-winning journalist and author, John Archibald, on Monday, February 3 at 7:30 p.m. in the Delchamps Recital Hall in Smith Hall. His lecture, “Holding on to Humanity in an A.I. World?” is free and open to the public. Mr. Archibald is the 2025 lecturer for the Dr. Rhoda Coleman Ellison Symposium, a lecture series established at Huntingdon in 1964 by the then chair of the English Department, Dr. Rhoda Coleman Ellison, to bring creative writers of regional and national distinction to campus. 

John Archibald is a columnist at AL.com. Among his numerous recognitions, he won the Pulitzer for Commentary in 2018 for his columns and was the lead reporter on the Pulitzer winner for Local Reporting in 2023, which examined out-of-control policing in Brookside, Alabama.  In 2024, he was elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board.

In 2021, Archibald wrote and co-hosted the national Murrow Award-winning podcast Unjustifiable, the story of a Black woman killed by Birmingham police in 1979. He is the author of Shaking the Gates of Hell: A Search for Family and Truth in the Wake of the Civil Rights Revolution, one of NPR’s favorite books of 2021. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2020-2021, and the inaugural Writer in Residence at Boston University in 2023.

Parking for the lecture will be available in the Smith Parking Lot, accessible from East Fairview Avenue adjacent to Neal Posey Baseball Field.

Huntingdon College, grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition of the United Methodist Church, is committed to nurturing growth in faith, wisdom, and service and to graduating individuals prepared to succeed in a rapidly changing world. Founded in 1854, Huntingdon is a coeducational liberal arts college.

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