Sister Helen Prejean and Stephen Bright

Dead Man Walking, the 1995 film exploring capital punishment in the United States, took the nation by storm and garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. Sister Helen Prejean C.S.J., the author behind the book that inspired the movie, will visit Louisville as a guest of the Kentucky Author Forum. The University of Louisville sponsors the Kentucky Author Forum in honor of its Bicentennial. Prejean, a writer, lecturer, and community organizer, has counseled both death row inmates and surviving family members of murder victims. She is winner of the Champion of Liberty Award from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the 1994 Christopher Book Award.

Prejean will hold a press conference at the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Undercroft, located at 443 S. Fifth Street, on October 12 at 4 p.m. Students and faculty from U of L are invited to observe the press conference. This event is free.

Prejean will be interviewed by Stephen Bright, a Danville, Kentucky native and the J. Skelly Wright Fellow at Yale Law School. He teaches courses in capital punishment and has represented persons facing the death penalty at trial, on appeals, and in post-conviction proceedings. Since 1982, Bright has served as director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, a public interest legal project which provides representation to those facing the death penalty and to inmates challenging unconstitutional conditions in prisons. In addition to the forum, Bright will give a free lecture in Allen Courtroom of the U of L School of Law on Friday, October 11, from 10:50 to noon.

Kentucky Educational Television (KET) will be carrying the Kentucky Author Forum on closed-circuit television at the St. Matthews/Eline Branch Public Library, located at 3940 Grandview Avenue, at 6 p.m. on October 12. Fifty free tickets, limited to four per person, are available at the Library's St. Matthews, Shawnee, Crescent Hill, Middletown, Bon Air Regional, and Highlands-Shelby Park branches and must be picked up in advance.

A private dinner with Prejean and Bright, hosted by University of Louisville President John Shumaker and his wife, Lucy, follows the event, and costs an additional $100. A dinner package for $115 may purchased through the Kentucky Center for the Arts.

The Kentucky Author Forum is a non-profit cultural project in cooperation with the Kentucky Center for the Arts and Hawley-Cooke Booksellers. The series features major authors in an interview setting. Upcoming forums will feature Neil Simon, with his new book Rewrites, on November 25; and John Updike, with his new book Golf Dreams on February 25. Two more Kentucky Author Forum events will announced in the future.