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Black Heritage-History Month program presents talk Feb. 26, film screening March 5 : ESPN news editor Claire Smith featured in film and lecture at WCSU

image of Claire Smith
Claire Smith

DANBURY, CONN. — The life and career of veteran sportswriter and ESPN news editor Claire Smith will be the subject of a documentary film screening on Tuesday, March 5, 2019, and the featured speaker at a lecture on Tuesday, Feb. 26, presented at Western Connecticut State University as part of Black Heritage-History Month.

The Department of Writing, Linguistics and Creative Process and the Office of Diversity and Equity at WCSU will host the screening of “A League of Her Own: The Claire Smith Story,” at 6 p.m. on March 5 in Room 127 of White Hall on the university’s Midtown campus, 181 White St. in Danbury. Snow date for the event is March 6. Smith will discuss her long and accomplished career in a talk at 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 26 in Ives Concert Hall in White Hall on the Midtown campus. Snow date for the lecture is Feb. 27. Admission is free and the public is invited to attend both events.

Smith, who has been a news editor at ESPN since 2007, covered Major League Baseball for more than three decades. She became the first female MLB beat writer as a correspondent for the Hartford Courant in the 1980s, and worked for seven years as a national baseball writer and columnist for the New York Times and nine years as an editor and columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Baseball Writers’ Association of America elected Smith as the 2017 recipient of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award for laudable contributions to baseball writing, becoming the first woman and fourth African American to earn this honor. Her award is on permanent display in the “Scribes and Mikemen” exhibit in the Library of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

For more information, send an email to stokesk@wcsu.edu or contact the Office of University Relations at (203) 837-8486.

 

 

Western Connecticut State University changes lives by providing all students with a high-quality education that fosters their growth as individuals, scholars, professionals and leaders in a global society. Our vision: To be widely recognized as a premier public university with outstanding teachers and scholars who prepare students to contribute to the world in a meaningful way.