NEMA is proud to announce award-winning social commentator Carlo Rotella as the keynote speaker for its 92nd Annual Conference, November 3 - 5 in Springfield, MA.

Dr. Rotella is Director of the American Studies Program, Professor of English, and Director of the Lowell Humanities Series at Boston College. He has held Guggenheim, Howard, and Du Bois fellowships and received the Whiting Writers Award, the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, and The American Scholar's prizes for Best Essay and Best Work by a Younger Writer. He writes regularly for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, and Slate, and he is a regular columnist for the Boston Globe and commentator for WGBH FM.  He is the author of Cut Time:  An Education at the Fights, Good With Their Hands, and October Cities, and his work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The American Scholar, Raritan, the Chicago Tribune, Transition, DoubleTake, Boston, The Believer, TriQuarterly, Critical Inquiry, American Quarterly, and The Best American Essays.  He is an editor of the "Chicago Visions and Revisions" series published by the University of Chicago Press.

“Rotella combines a scholar's rigorous sense of the past with an urban journalist's street wisdom.” – San Francisco Chronicle, reviewing Good With Their Hands.

“Carlo Rotella might or might not be good with his hands, but to borrow Lyle Lovett's phrase, he has 'lights in his fingers.' Rotella has written a well-crafted book a meditation, really on the fate of industrial culture in a postindustrial age.” – Chicago Tribune, reviewing Good With Their Hands.

"Carlo Rotella writes with his mind, his heart, and his gut. The result is prose that leaves you breathless. As one of his boxers says about another, `He can hit.'" – author Anne Fadiman, reviewing Cut Time.

"A wonderful book. . . . Cut Time is aimed at everyone, even readers who can't imagine that they could ever learn anything from men slugging it out in a ring. They can." – Wall Street Journal, reviewing Cut Time.

Dr. Rotella will speak at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, November 3.

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