Nov. 16: A conversation with Joe Biden

Article by UDaily staff November 03, 2017

Biden to discuss his life and career in program at Trabant University Center

University of Delaware alumnus Joe Biden, 47th vice president of the United States and founding chair of UD’s Biden Institute, will return to his alma mater on Thursday, Nov. 16, for a conversation about his new book Promise Me, Dad.

The free program will begin at 11 a.m. in the Multipurpose Rooms of the Trabant University Center. Tickets are free of charge, but seating is limited.

Tickets will be available to students and community members beginning Monday, Nov. 6, at the box offices in the Trabant University Center and the Bob Carpenter Center. Ticket distribution for this event will begin at 10 a.m. at both the Carpenter Center and Trabant box offices.

Presented by the Biden Institute, the University of Delaware stop is part of Biden’s American Promise Tour and will feature a conversation between Biden and novelist Lea Carpenter.

Their conversation will go beyond news headlines and social media comments to focus on topics that matter to the community. Biden will reveal the big political moments of his career, the life-altering choices he made and the key traits that have helped him persevere through challenges. He also will share how the loss of his son, Beau, tested his resolve and how he is finding new purpose in a time of uncertainty.

Novelist Lea Carpenter

Carpenter is the author of the 2013 novel Eleven Days, which told the history of America’s special operations forces from the points of view of a Naval operator who goes missing in Pakistan and his single mother at home in Pennsylvania. It was a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and long-listed for Britain’s Bailey’s Prize. Her second novel, Red White Blue, is a literary thriller about CIA’s China Ops intercut with the story of a marriage and a political campaign in Manhattan. A planned third novel, a series of monologues relating to the 1954 CIA coup in Iran, will complete her “terror wars trilogy.” A summa cum laude Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Princeton University, she has an MBA with honors from Harvard Business School. Her 2003 Harvard University Commencement speech, “Auden and the Little Things,” addressed the importance of poetry in wartime. Carpenter is a contributing editor at Esquire.

Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship and Purpose, published this month by Flatiron Books, is described as an intimate memoir about the most momentous year in Biden’s public life, as he confronted devastating personal loss, while trying to balance his duty to his family and his country.

Copies of Promise Me, Dad are now on sale at the Barnes and Noble University of Delaware Bookstore, 83 East Main St., Newark. It is currently on sale at $18.90, a discount of 30 percent off the list price.

About the Biden Institute

The Biden Institute, part of the College of Arts and Sciences’ School of Public Policy and Administration (SPPA) at UD, is a research and policy center, focusing on solutions to issues ranging from economic reform and environmental sustainability to civil rights, criminal justice, women’s rights and more.

Each semester, the institute plans to focus on a specific area of policy, with a goal of shaping the public conversation in that area and affecting policymaking at the local, state and federal levels.