Jennifer Egan to Speak at College Graduation

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan, C’85, and Ivan Sandoval, C’17, will speak at this year’s graduation ceremony for the University of Pennsylvania College of Arts and Sciences. The event will take place on Sunday, May 14, at 6:30 p.m. on Franklin Field.

Born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco, Jennifer Egan graduated from the College in 1985. She is the author of The Invisible Circus, which became a feature film; Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001; Emerald City and Other Stories; and the bestselling The Keep. Her most recent novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney’s, and other magazines.

She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Her non-fiction articles appear frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and “The Bipolar Kid” received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Her new novel, Manhattan Beach, will be published in October 2017.

Student speaker Ivan Sandoval is from McFarland, California, and majored in science, technology, and society with a minor in Latin American Studies. He is a recipient of the Wharton Innovation Fund Award and a Collaboration Conundrum grant recipient from the University of Notre Dame. He is a member of the Cipactli Latino Honor Society. Sandoval was elected to the Undergraduate Assembly, where he served as the director of sustainability, and to the Latino Coalition, where he advocated for increased Latino representation as the chair of admissions. He serves as editor of the undergraduate journal Momentum, and mentored freshmen as a PennQuest leader. Sandoval is interested in public service and entrepreneurship and plans to pursue a Ph.D. in the history of science or science studies.