UNH Speakers Bureau

Searching for Joy (Novel Title)

 

Program Description:

Set in Portsmouth, “Searching for Joy” focuses on father-son relationships and the things most meaningful in life. The novel explores the difficult issues Tom Derringer, an architect, must deal with when he discovers he has prostate cancer. Normally confident and self-assured, Derringer is shaken and forced to confront the meaning of his life and the possibility of his death. In the process he must come to understand – and come to terms with – himself, his wife and his son.


Speaker:

Tim Barretto

Tim Barretto is a professor of community leadership at the University of New Hampshire’s Thompson School of Applied Science (TSAS). He and colleague Kate Hanson co-founded the Thompson School’s Community Leadership Program in 2000 as a way of helping students interested in becoming activists and community leaders to find and develop their voices. Since then the program has won numerous awards, including twice being awarded the NH Governor's Spirit of NH Award in Higher Education (2007 & 2010). Tim has been teaching writing, speaking, and literature at UNH since 1986. A lifelong love of reading literature and writing fiction led him to recognize a personal need to be actively involved in working toward a better world. Since then, his principal focus has been to find ways to prevent child abuse. This work has led to considerable experience with public speaking; writing; community organizing; multi-media public relations; chairing and serving on committees and boards; and networking with local governments, state agencies, schools, and nonprofits that share the vision of promoting a safe world for children. His honors include a 2008 UNH Faculty Excellence Award for Excellence in Teaching; the 2008 Campus Compact of NH Presidents’ Good Steward Award; the 2002 Smith Award for Excellence in Service to Families, presented by the NH Children's Trust Fund to the HUB Family Resource Center, which Tim helped to found in 1994; and the 1992 Champions for Children Award, presented by the NH Task Force on Child Abuse and Neglect to Strafford County for Kids, which Tim also helped to found in 1989.

Other topics offered by Tim Barretto