Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity For Women Worldwide

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Nicholas Kristof, a columnist with The New York Times, will speak on Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide at 7pm Wednesday, October 28, at the University of California San Diego Price Center Ballroom West. The event is free and open to the public with no tickets or reservations required.

 

Kristof will talk about his journey through Africa and Asia and his encounters with women struggling in dire circumstances and those who, despite their own suffering, are providing hope and help to others.

 

He will also be signing his new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a call to arms against what he views as our era’s most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women in the developing worlds.

 

Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times since 2001, writes op-ed columns that appear twice a week. In 1990 Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, then 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.

 

Kristof won a 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.” 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. Kristof has taken a special interest in Web journalism and was the first blogger on The New York Times Web site; he also tweets and has a Facebook fan page and a channel on YouTube. A documentary about him, Reporter, premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2009 and will be shown on HBO.

 

In his column Kristof was an early opponent of the Iraq war, and among the first to warn that we were losing ground to the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. He was among the first to raise doubts about WMD in Iraq, he was the first to report that President Bush’s State of the Union claim about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa was contradicted by the administration’s own investigation. His columns have often focused on global health, poverty and gender issues in the developing world. In particular, since 2004 he has written dozens of columns about Darfur and visited the area ten times.

 

Kristof and 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.

 

The lecture is presented by the Helen Edison Lecture Series. In accordance with a major gift from a late philanthropist, the Helen Edison Lecture Series presents ongoing free public lectures on issues that advance humanitarian purposes and objectives. Attended annually by thousands, speakers include former Vice President Al Gore, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Muhammad Yunus, former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Toni Morrison, and Hispanic dramatist Luis Valdez, just to name a few.

 

For additional information contact UC San Diego Extension’s Helen Edison Lecture Series. (858/822-0510, http://helenedison.ucsd.edu)