Lorene Cary, an arts administrator and senior lecturer at Penn, is most widely known as a writer, whose works include the acclaimed memoir “Black Ice” and the novel “The Price of a Child.” “Before I left the States, I thought of myself, an African American woman, as a minority,” says Cary. “The Thouron year made me understand how wide – and how black and brown – the world is. It gave me confidence I could not have developed here in the U.S.” Her year at Sussex University not only put her in touch with English and African students, it gave her, for the first time, the open-ended opportunity “to read and write luxuriously.”