S.A. Yoder Memorial Lecture Series

The S.A. Yoder Lecture Series honors Dr. Samuel A. Yoder, a professor at GC from 1930 to 1935 and again from 1946 until his death in 1970. During his career, he was a Fulbright lecturer at Anatolia College in Greece, Smith-Mundt lecturer at the University of Hue in Vietnam, visiting professor at Taiwan University in Formosa, welfare officer under the United Nations in Egypt and GC Study-Service Term leader in Jamaica. Gifts to the series by his students and friends have made the endowed lecture possible.

Past guest lecturers

• 2008 -- Maurice Kilwein Guevara, poet, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• 2008 -- Brenda Cardenas, poet, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• 2008 -- Marilyn Nelson, poet, Connecticut
  
• 2007 -- Cornelius Eady, poet, Notre Dame, Indiana
• 2006 -- B. H. Fairchild, poet, Claremont, California
• 2004 -- Jean Janzen, poet, California
• 2003 -- Li-Young Lee, Chinese-American poet, Chicago, Ill.
• 2002 -- Sandra Birdsell, fiction, Saskatchewan, Canada
               Patrick Friesen, poet, British Columbia, Canada
• 2001 -- Edwidge Danticat, fiction writer, Haiti/New York City, N.Y.
• 2000 -- Nick Lindsay, poet, Edisto Island, S.C.
• 1999 -- David Dabydeen, novelist & poet, England & Guyana
• 1998 -- Donald Hall, poet, New Hampshire
• 1997 -- Denise Levertov, poet, Seattle, Wash.
• 1996 -- Jane Tompkins, critic, Duke University
• 1995 -- Scott Russell Sanders, essayist, Bloomington, Ind.
• 1994 -- Rudy Wiebe, novelist, Alberta, Canada
• 1993 -- Yevgeny Yevtushenko, poet, Moscow
• 1993 -- Gwendolyn Brooks, poet, Chicago, Ill.
• 1992 -- Seamus Heaney, poet, Dublin, Ireland
• 1990 -- Joyce Campion, actress, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• 1989 -- William Stafford, poet, Oregon
• 1988 -- Niyi Osundare, poet, Nigeria
• 1987 -- Robert Detweiler, scholar, Emory University
• 1986 -- Colleen J. McElroy, poet, University of Washington
• 1985 -- Garrison Keillor, humorist, Minnesota
• 1984 -- Madeleine L'Engle, fiction writer, New York City, N.Y.
• 1983 -- Peter Fallon, poet, County Meath, Ireland
• 1982 -- Jan Harold Brunvand, folklorist, University of Utah
• 1981 -- Quince Duncan, novelist, Costa Rica
• 1980 -- Eliot Wigginton, Foxfire editor, Appalachia
• 1979 -- Nuruddin Farah, novelist, Somalia
• 1978 -- Charles Forker, Shakespeare scholar, Indiana University
• 1977 -- Lucille Beachy, associate editor of Newsweek, N.J.
• 1976 -- Yorifumi Yaguchi, poet, Japan
• 1975 -- Rudy Wiebe, novelist, University of Alberta, Canada
• 1974 -- Tom Driver, critic, Union Theological Seminary
• 1973 -- Eugene Nida, linguist, American Bible Society
• 1972 -- Chad Walsh, poet, Beloit College