On Thursday, Aug. 16 at 10 a.m., Skidompha Library’s Chats with Champions program will welcome writer, columnist, biographer, and educator Patricia O’Toole. “Chats” are held in the Porter Meeting Hall and are sponsored by Sherman’s Maine Coast Book Shop. Please allow time for parking.

O’Toole’s latest book, “The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made,” measures Wilson by his own standards. O’Toole has written about Theodore Roosevelt in the acclaimed “When Trumpets Call,” and her biography of Henry Adams and his friends, “The Five of Hearts,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Now she revisits the presidency as it was a century ago and rethinks many of the standard interpretations of Woodrow Wilson and his legacy.  The result is an emotionally discerning, richly detailed portrait of a president whose ideas and actions had a profound and lasting effect on the United States and the world.

O’Toole is a professor emerita at Columbia University and a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. She has served on the nonfiction panel of judges for National Book Awards; has been a judge for PEN Award for the first book of nonfiction; is a member of fellows’ executive committee of MacDowell Colony; and a guest curator at the National Portrait Gallery.

Other Awards and Honors include Front Page Award for distinguished commentary; Emma Award, National Women’s Political Caucus and Radcliffe College and an Excellence in Media Award, Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination (GLAAD) for magazine work; Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching, Columbia University, 2004. Patricia O’Toole lives in Camden, Maine.

Following the presentation, books will be available for sale and signing, thanks to Sherman’s Maine Coast Book Shop. Chats with Champions is a free community offering from your national award-winning Skidompha Library and is sponsored by Sherman’s Maine Coast Book Shop. For more information call 563-5513 or online at www.skidompha.org