The Wire’s David Simon appears as part of 2007 Humanities Symposium

David Simon, writer and executive producer of HBO’s acclaimed crime drama The Wire, will appear at Loyola College on Tuesday, Feb. 6 as part of “Urban Spaces, Urban Voices,” the College’s 2007 Humanities Symposium. The event begins at 7:30 p.m. in McGuire Hall on the College’s North Charles Street campus.

Simon’s appearance is co-sponsored by the Departments of Communication, English, Fine Arts, and the American Studies minor.

“David Simon depicts the City of Baltimore in all its gritty reality, but in an aesthetically sophisticated way,” says English professor Jean Lee Cole, who is helping to organize the event along with colleagues from the Departments of Communication, Fine Arts and the American Studies minor. “His work provides a real counterpoint to Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the Humanities Symposium’s central text, and we hoped that bringing him here would give students, faculty and staff a way to reassess Jacobs’ work, which focuses on mid-20^th century New York, in light of the current issues facing Baltimore today.”

Prior to his work on The Wire, Simon spent several years as a reporter for The Sun in Baltimore. He is the author of two books, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. Homicide was later made into an NBC series, The Corner an Emmy-winning HBO mini-series.

A marathon screening of the most recent season of The Wire will take place the nights of Saturday, Feb. 3 and Sunday, Feb. 4 from 6 p.m. – midnight in the Reading Room.