Commission for Women to recognize Grace Lee Boggs, Gloria House and Ghassan Kridli

April 4, 2014

University of Michigan-Dearborn’s Commission for Women will honor Grace Lee Boggs, Gloria House and Ghassan Kridli during the organization’s annual Susan B. Anthony Awards Dinner Thursday, April 10.

Boggs will receive the community award and House and Kridli will receive campus awards.

U-M Regent Shauna Ryder Diggs will serve as keynote speaker.

Grace Lee Boggs

Boggs is being recognized for her lifetime of momentous contributions to human rights causes, locally, nationally and internationally. As she approaches her 100th birthday, and after many decades of devotion to work for positive social change, she still is a major political theorist and public intellectual, her example and writings continuing to offer guidance to activists in human rights projects around the world and in her home city of Detroit. Her many honors include honorary doctorates from the University of Michigan, Wooster College, Kalamazoo College and Wayne State University. She has been recognized with numerous lifetime achievement awards and has been inducted into both the National Women’s Hall of Fame and Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame.

Boggs is unable to attend the ceremony and her award will be accepted by her friend and colleague, Professor Gloria House. 

Gloria House

House is professor and director of African and African American studies and is an active member of the Women's and Gender Studies Advisory Board. She is a scholar, teacher, poet and activist who has served as a mentor for budding community activists, writers, students of color, and women and women of color on campus and in the wider community.  Since her youth, House has been a human rights and peace activist, beginning in the early 1960s in the southern Civil Rights struggles and continuing through to today with her work in Detroit community development.

Ghassan Kridli

Kridli is associate professor of industrial and manufacturing systems has served as faculty adviser of the campus chapter of the Society of Women Engineers. He is an active teacher, mentor and collaborator in support of women in a field where women are significantly underrepresented. He is well known and respected by colleagues and students alike for his efforts to recruit, encourage and mentor women students and faculty in engineering. He has distinguished himself by his collaboration with STEM colleagues outside of engineering in outreach activities in support of the principles of inclusion and the promotion of women in STEM.

The  Susan B. Anthony Awards Dinner will be held Thursday, April 10, in the Michigan Rooms at the Fairlane Center. The event includes appetizers, dinner and a silent auction that benefits the Commission's Supplemental Professional Development Fund. The cost for the evening is $35. Reservations must be returned by Monday, April 7, to Judy Walker 2157 UC or [email protected].