Nicholas Kristof

Keynote: Monday, April 30, 2007 at 7:30 p.m. in 150 Columbia

Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times since November 2001, writes op-ed columns that appear each Sunday and Tuesday. Previously, he was associate managing editor of The Times, responsible for the Sunday Times.

Mr. Kristof grew up on a sheep and cherry farm near Yamhill, Oregon. He graduated from Harvard College, Phi Beta Kappa, and then won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he studied law and graduated with first class honors. He later studied Arabic in Cairo and Chinese in Taipei. After working in France, he caught the travel bug and began backpacking around Africa and Asia, writing articles to cover his expenses. Mr. Kristof has lived on four continents, reported on six, and traveled to 120 countries, plus all 50 states, every Chinese province and every main Japanese island. He’s also one of the very few Americans to be at least a two-time visitor to every member of the Axis of Evil. During his travels, he has had unpleasant experiences with malaria, wars, an Indonesian mob carrying heads on pikes, and an African airplane crash.

After joining The New York Times in 1984, initially covering economics, he served as a correspondent in Los Angeles and as bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. In 2000, he covered the presidential campaign and in particular Governor Bush, and he is the author of the chapter on Mr. Bush in the reference book “The Presidents.”

In 1990 Mr. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, also a Times journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China’s Tiananmen Square democracy movement.  They were the first married couple to win a Pulitzer for journalism. Mr. Kristof  won a second Pulitzer in 2006, for commentary. He has also won other prizes including the George Polk Award, the Overseas Press Club award, the Michael Kelly award, the Online News Association award, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award.

Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn are authors of China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power and Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia. Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn are the parents of  Gregory, Geoffrey and Caroline. Mr. Kristof enjoys running, backpacking, and having his Chinese and Japanese corrected by his children.

Keynote speaker on Monday, April 30, 2007 at 7:30 p.m.
"Covering the First Genocide of the 21st Century: Reporting From Darfur"

I'll talk about Darfur and how it came about, and how we in the media blew it in terms of coverage. And I'll try to place it in a larger context, in terms of how the media rarely cover genocide well.