Salman Rushdie

Author Salman Rushdie was a guest of James Madison College on March 17, 2005. He spent nearly two hours in the afternoon at Wonders Kiva with students and faculty discussing his book Midnight’s Children, which was required reading for Madison freshmen. In the evening, he presented “Step Across This Line: An Evening with Salman Rushdie” at the Wharton Center.

Madison student Kate Ditzler, commented that she was particularly struck by Rushdie's comments that "the purpose of art was to go to the edge and push out the boundaries of experience, and that power would always push back" and that "he had many ideas about what novelists in the current era should be looking at: fragmented people who aren't of one ethnicity or race and have to deal with the divides inside of them, the borders and the weirdness of the world."