Ron Hansen

Distinguished author and Santa Clara University professor Ron Hansen, MFA, will deliver the Commencement Address and receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree during Loyola College in Maryland’s 157th Commencement Exercises on Saturday, May 16, College President Rev. Brian F. Linnane, S.J., has announced.

More than 1,600 baccalaureate and advanced degrees will be conferred during the Exercises, which begin at 11 a.m. at Baltimore’s 1st Mariner Arena.

“Ron Hansen is one of the country’s leading contemporary Catholic writers, and much of his fiction explores themes of spirituality in the modern world that I believe are very relevant to our students,” Fr. Linnane said. “It was particularly appealing to me that his most recent book focuses on the work of 19th century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. As such, I believe he has a unique understanding of our mission as a Jesuit institution and will offer our graduating students a message that will prove very meaningful as they commence this next phase in their lives”

Hansen, best known for his 1983 novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, is the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University, where he teaches courses in fiction writing, screenwriting, the Bible as literature, and American short stories.

His most recent work, 2008’s Exiles, recounts an 1875 shipwreck that took the lives of five nuns and inspired Jesuit poet Hopkins to write “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Hansen’s other novels include Atticus, Hitler’s Niece, Isn’t it Romantic? and Desperadoes. He is also the author of A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction, a collection of short stories titled Nebraska, and has edited or contributed to a variety of other publications.

Hansen’s 1991 novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, earned the fiction prize from the Bay Area Reviewers Association and the Gold Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. His other honors include a National Book Award nomination for Atticus and several PEN/Faulkner Award nominations.

Born in Omaha, Neb., Hansen holds a bachelor’s degree in English from that city’s Creighton University, which, like Santa Clara, is a Jesuit institution. He later earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and held a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University. More recently, he earned a master’s degree in spirituality from Santa Clara and was ordained a permanent deacon of the Catholic Church.

For more information on Loyola’s 2009 Commencement Exercises, please call the Loyola office of public relations at 410-617-5025 or visit www.loyola.edu/commencement.