Karen Crouse, award-winning sports and society reporter and correspondent for the <em>New York Times</em>, will deliver the 15th annual Casey Shearer Memorial Lecture at Brown University on Tuesday, April 14, 2015. Her talk, titled “Is sports real life or just a game? Reflections from the global playing fields,” begins at 6:30 p.m. in Metcalf Research Building, Friedman Auditorium.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Award-winning sports and society reporter Karen Crouse will deliver the 15th annual Casey Shearer Memorial Lecture at Brown University on Tuesday, April 14, 2015, at 6:30 p.m. in Metcalf Research Building, Friedman Auditorium, 190 Thayer St. Her talk, titled “Is sports real life or just a game? Reflections from the global playing fields,” is free and open to the public.

The lectureship, sponsored by Brown University and the Goldway-Shearer family, was established in memory of Casey Shearer, a promising young writer and aspiring sportscaster who died in May 2000, days before he was to graduate from Brown. Previous speakers have included Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer A. Scott Berg, ESPN anchor Chris Berman, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, ABC analyst Cokie Roberts, Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, film director Davis Guggenheim, NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson, food activist Curt Ellis, writer Pico Iyer, filmmaker Jeff Zimbalist, and journalist James Fallows.

Winners of the annual Casey Shearer Memorial Awards for Excellence in Creative Nonfiction will be announced prior to the lecture.

Karen Crouse

New York Times correspondent Karen Crouse is a leading writer on sports and society. She recently was honored by the Associated Press Sports Editors as one of the top 10 beat reporters in the country. She has covered the winter and the summer Olympics, World Cup matches, the National Football League, and numerous international sporting events during her 30-year career.

Her reporting led both the Augusta Golf Club, home of the Masters, and the Royal and Ancient golf club in St. Andrews, Scotland, to accept women members. She covered the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, and recently the PGA tour, including Tiger Woods’ sudden sabbatical from professional golf. In addition to her work at the New York Times, Crouse has been a sports columnist and correspondent for the Palm Beach Post and the Los Angeles Daily News. She began her newspaper career in Savannah, Georgia, and worked at seven other newspapers before being hired by the New York Times in 2005.

She is a graduate of the University of Southern California where she competed on the varsity swimming team. Her stories go beyond daily reporting, using narrative to explore human striving for athletic excellence and the ongoing struggle to make professional sports more diverse and inclusive.

Casey Shearer

Casey Shearer, a member of the Class of 2000, was a vibrant and talented member of the Brown community. An economics concentrator, he also studied Spanish, political science, and literature, and helped revive Brown Student Radio (WBSR). He was best known on campus as the station’s play-by-play sports announcer and as the author of the weekly sports column “On the Case,” published in the College Hill Independent.

Shearer was born and raised in Santa Monica, Calif., where his mother, Ruth Goldway, once served as mayor. He graduated from high school in Finland, where his father, Derek Shearer, an Occidental College professor, served as U.S. ambassador. A top student at Brown, Shearer was a member of the economics honor society and received his magna cum laude pin the Friday before he was to graduate. That same day, during a regular pickup game of basketball, Shearer’s heart stopped and he collapsed. Four days later, he died of an undetected heart virus, two months before his 22nd birthday.