The award-winning host of National Public Radio’s (NPR) Weekend Edition Sunday, Liane Hansen, will deliver the 2008 K.B. Willett Lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UWSP), on Tuesday, March 4.

Hansen’s lecture will be held in the Haferbecker Lecture Hall (Room 101) in the Collins Classroom Center (CCC) at 7:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the campus and the community.

In addition, Hansen will be available to meet with UWSP students in Room 111 CCC from 1:30 – 2:30 p.m. She will speak on "A Career in NPR." Her talk is sponsored by the College of Letters and Science.

Hansen has been the host of the award-winning Weekend Edition Sunday for more than 18 years. Her extensive background in broadcast journalism goes beyond on-air host and includes work as a reporter and radio producer at both the local and national level. Her show has won the prestigious James Bear Award for best radio program. From the early 1980s until 1989 Hansen hosted Performance Today, NPR’s daily two-hour classical music and arts information program. With NPR Hansen has been a regular guest host for newsmagazines, including her work with Fresh Air since 1976. In the early 1980s she hosted Weekend All Things Considered. Her start in public broadcasting began at WSKG in Binghamton, New York.

In 2001 she received the National News and Documentary Emmy Award for "She Says/Women in News." In addition, Hansen was part of NPR’s coverage of Sept. 11, which received the 2001 Peabody Award. A native of Worcester, Massachusetts, she attended the University of Hartford and acted with the Worcester Children’s Theatre, Entr’Actors Guild, Footlights Theater Company and the Fenwick Theater Company at Holy Cross College.

The Willett Lectureship Endowment is handled through the Office of Academic Affairs and rotates each year between UWSP’s four colleges. The program brings distinguished scholars, speakers and persons of renown in various fields of endeavor to the campus each year. Next year the lecture will be organized and presented by the College of Natural Resources.

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