Tickets for the lecture by education reformist and award-winning author Jonathan Kozol are still available at Indiana University East. Kozol is visiting the campus April 3 to present a lecture titled “Children and Teachers Under Siege: Race, Poverty, and the Public Schools.” The tickets available are for overflow seating in Whitewater Hall room 132 and the Whitewater Hall Community Room. The presentation will be steamed live to these locations.

The lecture is free and open to the public but a ticket is required. Tickets are available at the Office of the Bursar, located in Whitewater Hall. Kozol’s presentation will be in Vivian Auditorium.

Immediately following the lecture, Kozol will be available to sign recent copies of his newest book: Fire in the Ashes. The book is available for purchase in the IU East Bookstore.

The event is sponsored by IU East and the Diversity Commission.

Kozol is the National Book Award–winning author of Savage Inequalities, Death at an Early Age, The Shame of the Nation, Amazing Grace, and Fire in the Ashes among others. In the passion of the civil rights campaigns of 1964 and 1965, Kozol gave up the prospect of a promising and secure career within the academic world, moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood of Boston, and became a fourth grade teacher.

He has since devoted his life to the challenge of providing equal opportunity within public schools to every child, of whatever racial origin or economic level. He is, at the present time, the most widely read and highly honored education writer in America.

In fall 2012, Kozol published Fire in the Ashes, a powerful and stirring culmination of the stories he has told over a quarter-century about the children of the poorest urban neighborhood in the United States. Fire in the Ashes follows these children out of their infancy, through the struggles of their adolescence, and into their young adulthood. Some of their stories are painful and heart-breaking, but others are thrilling and dramatic tributes to the courage and audacity of fascinating children who refuse to be defeated by the gross inequalities of U.S. education and arrive at last at gloriously unpredictable and triumphal victories.

When he is not in classrooms, or at universities speaking to future teachers, Kozol spends time in Washington advocating against the No Child Left Behind Act and to convince members of the Senate that an emphasis on “teaching-to-the-test” is unhealthy for children and degrading to teachers. Video interviews of Kozol are available online, including this 2011 “Save our schools” rally video.

Kozol received a summa cum laude degree in English literature from Harvard, after which he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University.