CANTON -- St. Lawrence University’s Arts Collaborative will host Shaka Senghor, a writer, mentor and motivational speaker, whose story of redemption has inspired youth and young adults at high schools, universities and conferences across the nation.

Senghor transformed his life and discovered his love for writing while serving 19 years in prison. He has written a memoir about his life, titled Writing My Wrongs, and published a collection of essays and poems about his abusive childhood, life in the streets and life in prison titled Live in Peace: A Youth Guide to Turning Hurt into Hope.

He is founder of the Atonement Project, a recipient of the 2012 Black Male Engagement Leadership Award, a 2013 MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, a Fellow in the inaugural class of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Community Leadership Network and teaches a course on the Atonement Project at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He shared his message on the TED stage in March 2015, and in just four months his talk reached more than 1 million views.

Sponsored by the John F. O’Loughlin Leadership Series Endowment, Senghor will deliver his lecture, titled “Restorative Justice, Atonement and the Power of Literature” from 7 to 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 4, in Peterson-Kermani Performance Hall. He will address the themes of acknowledgement, apology and atonement and discuss The Atonement Project, a global initiative that seeks to facilitate healing and understanding between victims of violent crimes and violent offenders through the use of art, literature and technology. The event is free and open to the public.

For more information, contact St. Lawrence University's Office of Academic Affairs at 229-5998 or visit www.stlawu.edu/arts-collaborative.