Canceled Gyasi lecture to be rescheduled
SPECIAL TO THE ORACLE
After Yaa Gyasi’s flight from New York was canceled the day before she was set to speak at USF, College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) Dean Eric Eisenberg said work has already begun to reschedule.
Gyasi, a New York Times best-selling author who wrote the novel “Homegoing.” The story follows the lives of the descendants of two sisters from Ghana. The book, arranged in vignettes, gives glimpses into their lives in both Ghana and the U.S. Eisenberg told The Oracle that Gyasi would speak about the process of writing her novel and the immigrant experience.
“She has an eleven o’clock flight today and we started watching the weather yesterday. Christina (Goldstein) and I emailed everybody and Facebooked everybody up in New York and checked on the weather maps and they just started canceling flights so we figured that she wasn’t going to be able to make it here,” Eisenberg said.
Eisenberg said he made the decision to cancel Gyasi’s speech, part of the CAS Frontier Forum lecture series, yesterday. He said he is disappointed by the cancelation.
“It’s the right time for her to be here and I can’t wait to get her down here but you know the weather is the weather," he said. "That’s the way the world is. We’re actually pretty fortunate that I don’t think this has happened before in this lecture series. I don’t think we’ve ever had a cancelation because a speaker couldn’t make it because of the weather, which is pretty amazing given how crazy the weather has been the last couple of years.”
Gyasi’s flight was canceled because of a snowstorm in New York City, one of many flights canceled due to the storm, according to Christina Goldstein, conference and events planner with CAS. Eisenberg said CAS is currently working on rescheduling the lecture for March.
“We also have a group coming over from Ghana in March and we were thinking it would be awesome if they were here while she came down,” he said
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