NEW ROCHELLE, NY — Dorothy H. Wickenden, executive editor of The New Yorker, will be the keynote speaker for the 2015 undergraduate commencement ceremony. She also will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree at commencement, which begins at 11 a.m. on Saturday, May 16, in The Theatre at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
Wickenden has been executive editor of The New Yorker since January 1996. She joined the magazine as managing editor in 1995. She is also the moderator of The New Yorker’s weekly podcast, “The Political Scene.”
Wickenden was national affairs editor at Newsweek from 1993-1995. Before that, she spent 15 years at The New Republic, as managing editor and later as executive editor. She edited “The New Republic Reader: 80 Years of Opinion and Debate” (Basic Books, 1994) and has written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and The Wilson Quarterly. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1988-1989.
The author of the best-selling book, The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West. Wickenden is currently working on a book about abolitionism.
Wickenden is a graduate of William Smith College, where she was awarded an honorary degree in 2014.
See more about Iona’s commencement ceremonies at www.iona.edu/commencement.