Prize-winning Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison and New York Times reporter Joseph Berger, author of the acclaimed memoir Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust (Scribner, 2001), will give a talk about life  as a refugee in the U.S. at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 24, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave. The lecture, titled Exiles in Paradise: Growing Up As a Refugee in America, is open to the public and free of charge.

“The challenge for many of us in the Lewiston-Auburn area is to try to get inside the heads of new immigrants who are coming to Lewiston to understand what they are thinking and feeling. Joe Berger will give us an opportunity to do that,” says James Carignan, dean of the college.

Born in the Soviet Union in 1945 to Jewish refugees from Poland, Berger wrote Displaced Persons about his family’s experience as immigrants in New York City in the 1950s and ’60s. It was selected as a New York Times “notable” book and warmly praised by reviewers in the Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune. Elie Wiesel called the book “a powerful and sweetly melancholic memoir, brilliantly written.” Previously Berger wrote The Young Scientists (Addison Wesley, 1993), a study of the country’s top science high schools and their students.

Berger has been a reporter and editor with The New York Times since 1984. He was a religion correspondent from 1985 to 1987, covering the Pope’s trip to 10 American cities in nine days, and national education correspondent from 1987 to 1990, a period when American school curricula were under attack as too European-focused. From 1990 until 1993, he covered New York City’s schools and colleges, a period when there were bitter controversies over condom distribution and AIDS instruction.

Berger received the1993 Education Writers Association Award for exposing abuses in bilingual education. Also in 1993, he was named Times bureau chief in White Plains, the bureau that covers Westchester and upstate New York. In September 1999, he was appointed deputy education editor, a role in which he helped direct coverage of the changes in national education policy, the firing of one New York school chancellor, the shaky tenure of another and a series on the first year of a new teacher. Since the summer of 2002, he has been a senior metropolitan reporter specializing in feature stories growing out of New York City’s changing neighborhoods and ethnic composition.

Prior to joining the Times, Berger worked as Newsday’s religion writer, where, three times, he won the Supple Award given by the Religion Newswriters Association, its highest honor. Berger also worked at the New York Post, covering such assignments as the 1973 Middle East War and Watergate. From 1967 to 1971, he was an English teacher at a Bronx junior high school.

Berger grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx. He is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, City College and the Bronx High School of Science.

With the end of the winter semester coming into view, public events in the arts and humanities reach their peak in late February and March. To assist with your story planning,listed are the following highlights from the arts and humanities calendar through the end of March. Detailed press releases will precede most events.

Perhaps the most prominent event in the humanities in the weeks to come will begin March 14: Toward Harmony: Understanding a New Diversity in Lewiston-Auburn, a two-day conference involving faculty, civic leaders and members of the local Somali community.

Other events sure to interest your readers include speaking appearances by conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza and Roe v. Wade attorney Sarah Weddington; concerts by the Brentano String Quartet with guest Yuri Funihashi, a Maine pianist; a reading by poet Lorna Goodison; and the Bates production of Eric Bogosian’s hard-hitting play subUrbia.

Here’s a summary of events by genre:

Humanities: Sponsored by the Bates Department of Philosophy and Religion, in collaboration with several local organizations and the Maine Humanities Council, the Toward Diversity conference is major news. Speakers include Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Stephen Wessler of the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence, and Heather Lindkvist, an Bates anthropologist who has worked with the local Somali community for more than a year. Performances end each day of discussions.

Also on the humanities calendar: the reading by noted Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison (March 6); a speaking appearance by Sarah Weddington, the attorney who successfully argued the Roe v. Wade case 30 years ago (March 12); the lecture What’s So Great About America by Dinesh D’Souza, the best-selling author and conservative commentator (March 19); and a discussion of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein by Marshall Brown, a scholar of gothic literature from the University of Washington (also March 19).

Music: A profile of pianist Frank Glazer, artist in residence at Bates, is timely, as this most enduring of Maine musicians performs twice in coming weeks. On Feb. 16 he devotes a program to composer Carol Maria von Weber. His March 14 program features work by Bach, Beethoven, Ravel and Chopin.

Another Maine pianist comes to Olin Arts Center Concert Hall about a week earlier. On March 8, Yuri Funahashi, adjunct professor at the University of Maine at Farmington and someone familiar to Maine audiences, is guest artist with the renowned Bretano String Quartet, resident quartet at Princeton University. This final entry in the 2002-2003 Bates College Concert Series features music by Bach, Webern, Shostakovich and Dvorak.

Finally in music, it’s the season for a variety of student concerts. In addition to individual performances, the schedule includes the Choir’s rendition of Mozart’s Requiem, with orchestral accompaniment (March 21) and a joint performance, still being planned, by the college’s Indonesian-style gamelan ensemble and orchestra (March 28).

Visual Arts: Continuing through March are exhibits by premiere Maine abstractionist William Manning (Museum of Art) and Harvard photographer Kris Snibbe, showing images of Cambodian, Chinese, and Tibetan Buddhists in the United States (Chapel).

Meanwhile, the popular annual exhibition by Lewiston Middle School students opens March 6 and continues through the month. On that same day, Gary Green, assistant professor of art at the University of Southern Maine, comes to Bates to discuss the photographs in his Landscape Diaries series.

The following evening, one of the nation’s foremost experts on the connections between African and New World arts — visual and performing — speaks at Bates. The topic of the lecture by Robert Farris Thompson, art history professor and master of Yale’s Timothy Dwight College, has yet to be confirmed.

Stage: In an annual tradition, Bates students perform Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues on Valentine’s Day, with donations at the door to benefit local charities. Another seasonal tradition is the senior thesis performance project, and March 21-23 it’s Thomas Kyd’s Elizabethan tragedy The Spanish Tragedy, produced by Dominick Pangallo, of Salem, Mass.

Meanwhile, March 7-16, the theater department offers six performances of subUrbia, Eric Bogosian’s semi-autobiographical exploration of alienated youth, set in a strip mall parking lot.

Finally, too many good dances to perform in one evening have led the Bates Modern Dance Company to offer two different programs in its annual spring concert, one of Bates’ best-attended events. Directed by Marcy Plavin, who has run the dance program since the late 1960s (another good profile subject), each program is performed twice, March 20-23.

This release represents only the highlights of a jam-packed month. Full releases will detail many of these events, and others, in the coming weeks. For more information, interview availabilities and art, please contact Staff Writer Doug Hubley at telephone 207-786-6329 or e-mail.