Sister Helen Prejean Returns to Discuss Social Justice

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Sister Helen Prejean

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. –Sister Helen Prejean, the author of Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, will present a lecture and hold a book signing on Thursday, April 26. The J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences Honors Program at the University of Arkansas is hosting the event.

“Occasionally, we are blessed, as a community, to host a visitor who has single-handedly bent the moral arc of the universe a degree or two more toward justice and love,” said Sidney Burris, professor of English and director of the Fulbright College Honors Program. “In a few days we will witness just such a person.”

Prejean was born in Louisiana and joined the Sisters of St. Joseph of Madaille (now known as the Congregation of St. Joseph) in 1957. She dedicated her life to the poor of New Orleans in 1981, after earning a bachelor’s degree in English and education and a master’s degree in religious education. Since 1984, she has divided her time between educating citizens about the death penalty and counseling individual death row prisoners. Prejean’s experiences while accompanying six men to their deaths have led her to suspect that some of those executed were not guilty.

An advocate for social justice and against capital punishment, Prejean’s outspoken and thoughtful approach led Los Angeles Times staff writer Scott Martelle to write, “If death row has a patron saint, it would be Prejean.”

“Over the past year our community has been busily building its own arc of interest in these matters of justice and compassion,” said Burris. “It is an arc that began with the Dalai Lama’s arrival a year ago, continued with Elie Wiesel this spring, and lands now squarely on the shoulders of Sister Helen, whose return visit rounds off an extraordinary year for our campus. And an extraordinary year for justice and human rights.”

Prejean wrote in her blog about her May 11, 2011, appearance at the University of Arkansas with professor Vincent Harding and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The impact of that experience is the impetus for her return.

Dead Man Walking spent 31 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, has been translated into 10 different languages, was nominated for a 1993 Pulitzer Prize, made the 1994 American Library Associates Notable Books List, was adapted into a 1995 film and later a play by the same name, served as the basis for an opera that premiered in 2000 and was performed by the Tulsa Opera in February, and inspired the Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project that was founded in 2003. Prejean’s second book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, was published in 2004.

The lecture, followed by a book signing, will be at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 26, in Old Main’s Giffels Auditorium on the University of Arkansas campus. The event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase after the lecture (cash or check only).