The first husband-wife team to win journalism’s highest honor will hold a Q&A at 12:25 in Whitley Auditorium and speak at a 3:30 p.m. program in Alumni Gym.
A open question and answer session for faculty and staff will be held at 12:25 p.m. in Whitley Auditorium.
All faculty and students must pick up tickets for this event at the Center for the Arts Box Office. Tickets are free with Elon ID and $13 for the general public.
Box Office hours:
Monday through Wednesday: 12:30-5 p.m.
Thursday & Friday: 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Kristof and WuDunn won a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for their New York Times coverage of China’s Tiananmen Square democracy movement and have co-authored three best-selling books: “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide”; “China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power”; and “Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia.”
The October visit will be a return to Elon for Kristof, who was the keynote speaker at Spring Convocation in 2010 when the university installed its chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious academic honor society.
Kristof is often called the “reporter’s reporter” for his human rights advocacy. In 1990, he and WuDunn, then also a New York Times journalist, became the first husband-wife team to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism. Kristof won his second Pulitzer in 2006 for what the judges called “his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world.”
Kristof graduated from Harvard College with Phi Beta Kappa honors and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford to study law. He later studied Arabic in Cairo, Chinese in Taipei, and Japanese in Tokyo.
After working in France, he backpacked in Africa and Asia while writing articles to cover his expenses. Kristof has lived on four continents, reported on six, and traveled to more than 150 countries. During his travels, he has caught malaria, experienced wars, confronted warlords, encountered an Indonesian mob carrying heads on pikes, and survived an African airplane crash.
After joining The New York Times in 1984, Kristof served as a correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo. He has covered presidential politics, interviewed everyone from President Obama to Iranian President Ahmadinejad, and was the first blogger on The New York Times website.
WuDunn, the first Asian-American reporter to win a Pulitzer Prize, is today a business executive and best-selling author. She currently works with entrepreneurs in new media, media technology and social enterprise at a small investment banking boutique in New York City. She also runs TripleEdge, which focuses on socially driven investing.
WuDunn has been vice president in the role of investment advisor for private clients, in the investment management division at Goldman, Sachs & Co., and a commercial loan officer at Bankers Trust. She also is one of a small handful of people who have worked at The New York Times as both an executive and a journalist: in management roles in both the Strategic Planning and Circulation Sales departments at The Times; as editor for international markets, energy and industry; as The Times’ first anchor of an evening news headlines program for a digital cable TV channel, the Discovery-Times; and as a foreign correspondent for The Times in Tokyo and Beijing, where she wrote about economic, financial, political and social issues.
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement, WuDunn has won other journalism prizes, including the George Polk Award and Overseas Press Club awards. She received a White House Project EPIC award, the Asia Women in Business Corporate Leadership Award, the Pearl S. Buck Woman of the Year Award, and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Prize, among numerous other awards.
In 2011, Newsweek cited WuDunn as one of the “150 Women Who Shake the World.” In 2013, she was included as one of the “leading women who make America” in the PBS documentary, “The Makers.”
WuDunn earned an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, where she is a former member of its Advisory Council, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. She graduated from Cornell University, where she was a member of the Board of Trustees from 2002 to 2013. She is now a member of the Board of Trustees at Princeton University.