James Carroll, Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Residence, will speak on his new book "House of War", 4-6pm, C. Walsh Theatre

JAMES CARROLL was born in Chicago in 1943 and raised in Washington, D.C., where his father, an air force general, served as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.  He attended Georgetown University before entering St. Paul’s College, the Paulist Fathers’ seminary in Washington, where he graduated with B.A. and M.A. degrees.  In 1965 he studied poetry with Allen Tate at the University of Minnesota.  He was a civil rights worker and community organizer in Washington and New York.  In 1969 he was ordained into the priesthood. 

The Paulists and Cardinal Cushing assigned Carroll to Boston University, where he served as Catholic chaplain from 1969 to 1974.  During those years he published numerous books on religious subjects and a weekly column in the National Catholic Reporter, which earned him awards from the Catholic Press Association and other organizations.  He studied poetry with George Starbuck and eventually published a book of poems.  He remained active in the antiwar movement until the Vietnam War ended. 

Carroll left the priesthood to become a writer.  In 1974 he was a playwright-in-residence at the Berkshire Theater Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.  In 1976 he published his first novel, Madonna Red, which was translated into seven languages.  Since then he has published eight additional novels, including Mortal Friends (1978), Prince of Peace(1984), and The City Below, a New York Times Notable Book of 1994. Carroll writes a weekly op-ed column for the Boston Globe and is an occasional contributor to numerous journals, including The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly.  His memoir, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us, won several prizes, including the 1996 National Book Award in non-fiction.

Carroll is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on its Committee for International Security Studies.  He is a member of the council of PEN/New England, and he served four years as its chair.  He has been a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School.  Carroll is also a trustee of the Boston Public Library and a member of the advisory board of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University.

He lives in Boston with his wife, the novelist Alexandra Marshall, and their two grown children.