Misericordia University to Honor Andrew Krivak at Winter 2025 Commencement

Misericordia University to Honor Andrew Krivak at Winter 2025 Commencement

DALLAS, PA - Misericordia University (MU) announced today that Andrew Krivak, an award-winning author and poet, will be the commencement honoree and guest speaker at the university's Winter Commencement Ceremony on Sunday, December 14, 2025. Krivak will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Degree during the ceremony.

Krivak is the author of five novels, two chapbooks of poetry, and two works of nonfiction. His 2011 debut novel, The Sojourn, was a National Book Award finalist and winner of both the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction and the inaugural Chautauqua Prize. He followed The Sojourn with The Signal Flame, a novel The New York Times said evoked “an austere landscape, a struggling family, and a deep source of pain” in Krivak’s fictional Dardan, Pennsylvania. 

His third novel, The Bear, received the Banff Mountain Book Prize for fiction, the Massachusetts Book Award, and was a five-time National Endowment for the Arts Big Read title. Like the Appearance of Horses, released in 2023, returned to the characters and landscape of Dardan. His fifth novel, Mule Boy, is forthcoming in 2026. 

As a poet, Krivak has published the short collections Islands, and Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves.  He is also author of the memoir A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life, and editor of The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902-1912, which won the Louis Martz Prize for scholarly research on William Carlos Williams. 

Krivak holds a BA from St. John’s College, Annapolis; an MFA in poetry from Columbia University; an MA in philosophy from Fordham University; and a PhD in literary modernism from Rutgers University. 

Currently, he is a discussion moderator with the New Hampshire Department of Correction’s Family Connections Center, and Visiting Lecturer on English at Harvard University. Krivak lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

Misericordia’s Winter Commencement Ceremony will be held in the Anderson Center on-campus. Doors open at 12:30 p.m. and all guests must present a ticket for entry. The ceremony will be live-streamed and recorded on the university’s YouTube page beginning at 2:00 p.m. for those who cannot attend in person.