Newswise — CANTON, N.Y. - Students, faculty, staff and guests at Commencement 2012 will hear remarks from "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau and Skidmore College dance professor Mary DiSanto-Rose '75 at St. Lawrence University's Commencement ceremony, on Sunday, May 20, at 10 a.m. on Creasy Commencement Commons. Both will be awarded honorary degrees at the ceremony.

Indian Lake Spanish teacher Martha Swan, founder of the organization John Brown Lives!, will be awarded the North Country Citation.

Trudeau grew up in Saranac Lake, N.Y., and holds a bachelor's degree and MFA in graphic design from Yale University. He launched the "Doonesbury" comic strip in 1970, and it now appears in nearly 1,500 newspapers in the United States and abroad, distributed by Universal Press Syndicate. In 1975, Trudeau became the first comic-strip artist to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Since then, he's been a finalist three times, including this year for his strips concerning the war in Iraq.

DiSanto-Rose graduated from St. Lawrence in 1975 with a degree in chemistry and earned a master's degree and doctorate from Temple University. She joined the faculty at Skidmore in 1981 and serves on numerous New York State and independent dance and dance education groups. She performs as a guest artist with the Isadora Duncan International Institute Dancers of New York City and has re-staged a number of classic modern dance works.

Swan founded John Brown Lives! in 1999 "to engage Adirondack communities in the freedom history of their region and to promote social justice and human rights." The organization is the recent recipient of a New York State Council on the Humanities Major Grant supporting public programs on historic and contemporary slavery.

The University annually awards the North Country Citation to an individual or group from the region who, through professional and volunteer endeavors, has improved the quality of life in the North Country.