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Frank Bruni writes a twice-weekly column in the Times reflecting his interests in American politics, higher education, gay rights, and popular culture.

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – Frank Bruni, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, will discuss the effects of identity politics and the importance of free speech in a free lecture on Wednesday, January 9, at 7 p.m. in Wilson Hall at the McCullough Student Center. His talk is sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council and host Middlebury College, with additional support from the Mellon Foundation.

Bruni’s twice-weekly column reflects the diversity of his interests, from American politics to gay rights and from popular culture to higher education. He is a frequent contributor to CNN, an occasional guest on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, and the 2016 recipient of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association’s Randy Shilts Award for bringing stories of the LGBTQ community to mainstream media outlets.

Bruni, 54, joined the staff of the Times in 1995 as a metropolitan reporter and writer for the Sunday magazine and Arts & Leisure section. In 1998, he was assigned to the Washington, D.C., bureau where he covered Capitol Hill, the presidential campaign of George W. Bush, and the White House.

In 2002, Bruni was promoted to chief of the Times’s Rome bureau and in 2004 the paper brought him back to New York as its chief restaurant critic, a post that he held for five years before becoming a staff writer for the Sunday magazine. In 2011, Bruni joined Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, and others as an “opposite-the-editorial-page” writer with his own column appearing every Sunday and Wednesday.

He is the author of the books Ambling into History (Harper, 2002), Born Round (Penguin Press, 2009), and Where You Go Is Not Where You’ll Be (Grand Central, 2015), and coauthor of A Gospel of Shame (Viking, 1993), A Meatloaf in Every Oven (Grand Central, 2017), and other titles.

A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a BA in English, Bruni earned an MS in journalism from Columbia University School of Journalism. He was a Pulitzer Traveling Fellow prior to launching his career with the Detroit Free Press.