JCU to Welcome Billy Collins and Azza Karam at Commencement 2022
John Cabot University is honored to announce the special guests for the 2022 Commencement Ceremony, poet Billy Collins and Dr. Azza Karam, Secretary-General of Religions for Peace.
JCU is also pleased to announce that we will hold this year’s Commencement Ceremony in person at Villa Aurelia on the Janiculum Hill overlooking the city of Rome on Monday, May 16, 2022. 209 students representing 41 countries are expected to graduate.
Commencement Speaker Billy Collins
Billy Collins (photo by Bill Hayes)
Billy Collins was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001-2003 and served as New York State Poet 2004-2006. A former Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, he is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work manages to combine high critical acclaim with broad public appeal. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar. Three of his collections have broken sales records for poetry and his readings are usually standing room only. Collins has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He received the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award for Humor in Poetry.
Collins sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious.” It is a door that many thousands of readers have opened with amazement and delight. Collins has published thirteen collections of poetry, including The Rain in Portugal, Whale Day, Aimless Love, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, Horoscopes for the Dead, and Picnic, Lightning. A collection of his haiku, She Was Just Seventeen, was published in 2006. He is the editor of three poetry anthologies: Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry; 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Everyday; and Bright Wings: Poems about Birds, illustrated by David Sibley.
A great friend of John Cabot University, Collins was Poet in Residence during the Summer 2012 Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation. In 2017 JCU’s Italy Reads program welcomed him as the keynote speaker on American poet Emily Dickinson.
A Doctorate in Humane Letters honoris causa will be bestowed upon Billy Collins.
Honorary Degree Recipient: Dr. Azza Karam
Dr. Azza Karam (photo by Christian Flemming)
JCU will also confer a Doctorate in Humane Letters honoris causa to Dr. Azza Karam, Secretary-General of Religions for Peace – the largest multireligious leadership platform with 92 national and 6 regional Interreligious Councils. She also holds a Professorship of Religion and Development at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands – of which she is a citizen. Born in Egypt, she now lives in the United States. She studied at JCU during the 1984-1985 academic year.
She served as a Senior Advisor on Culture, at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA); and as Coordinator/Chair of the United Nations Inter-Agency Task Force on Religion and Development (UN IATF-R&D); and founder of the Multi-Faith Advisory Council of the UN IATF-R&D. In those capacities, she coordinated engagement with members of a Global Interfaith Network for Population and Development with over 600 faith-based organizations from all regions of the world, representing all religions and interreligious affiliations. She was the Lead Facilitator for the United Nations’ Strategic Learning Exchanges on Religion, Development and Diplomacy, building on a legacy of serving as a trainer cum facilitator of intercultural leadership and management in the Arab region as well as Europe and Central Asia.
Karam has served in different positions in the United Nations since 2004, as well as other intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations since the early 1990s, such as International IDEA, OSCE, and Religions for Peace. Simultaneously, she lectured in various academic institutions in Europe, in North America (including the United States Military Academy/West Point), Africa and the Middle East. Her Ph.D. in 1996, focused on Political Islam, and became her first book in Arabic (her mother tongue) and in English. She has since published widely, and in several languages, on international political dynamics, including democratization, human rights, peace and security, gender, religious engagement, and sustainable development.
