Presenters

Allen is director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a professor in the Department of Government and Graduate School of Education. A 2001 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” she is a political theorist who has published broadly in democratic theory and the history of political thought. A past chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, she is known for her work on justice and citizenship in ancient Athens and modern America. @dsallentess

Baquet is executive editor of The New York Times. Before assuming that position in 2014, he was managing editor for news and Washington bureau chief. He was formerly managing editor and editor of the Los Angeles Times. He worked previously for The Times-Picayune in his native New Orleans and for the Chicago Tribune. There, he won a 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism for stories he wrote with two other reporters on municipal corruption. @deanbaquet

Caro is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, in 1975 for “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” and in 2003 for “Master of the Senate,” the third in a multi-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. In 2010, he received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. Early in his career as a journalist, Caro worked as an investigative reporter for Newsday. He was a 1966 Nieman Fellow. @RobertACaro

Cortese is music director of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras. Beside Italy, his homeland, his symphonic and operatic engagements include Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Washington, Helsinki, Oslo, Melbourne, Sydney, and the Spoleto, Tanglewood, and Aspen festivals. He teaches at the Aspen Conducting Academy. He has served as assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Seiji Ozawa.

Díaz is the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at MIT. His debut novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His most recent book, “This Is How You Lose Her,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and “The Best American Short Stories,” and he is fiction editor at the Boston Review. In 2012, he received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” @junotdiaz

Elkins is professor of history and African and African American studies at Harvard University. Her first book, “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya,” won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Elkins is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. Her current research interests include colonial violence and post-conflict reconciliation in Africa, and violence and the decline of the British Empire.

is the president and Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard University. A historian of the Civil War and the American South, Faust was the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is the author of six books, including “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.” Previously, she served as the Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a member of the faculty for 25 years.

Fiore is a political cartoonist who specializes in animated editorial cartoons. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 2010. His animated work has been featured on the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, SFGate.com, for more than 10 years as well as appearing on a number of news websites, CNN, and Frontline. His political cartoons have appeared in numerous U.S. newspapers, including The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. @MarkFiore

Ganim is a CNN correspondent based in New York, covering a wide range of stories and investigations on television and for CNN.com. She joined CNN in 2012 from The Patriot News in Harrisburg, Pa., where she broke the story of the grand jury investigation into the sexual abuse of children by Jerry Sandusky, the former defensive coordinator for the Penn State University football program. That reporting earned her a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. @sganim

Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. She won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2009 for “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.” Her most recent book, co-authored with Peter S. Onuf, is “The Most Blessed of Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of Imagination.” @agordonreed

Graham is chairman of Graham Holdings, which owns Slate, Foreign Policy, and television stations, among other assets. He was publisher of The Washington Post from 1979 to 2000 and chairman of the paper from 2000 to 2008. He joined the Post in 1971 and held a number of news and business positions at the newspaper and at Newsweek. He is a past member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. A 1966 graduate of Harvard College, he was president of The Harvard Crimson.

Grossfeld is an associate editor at The Boston Globe, where he also works as a writer and photographer for the sports section. In 1984, he won the Pulitzer Prize in Spot News Photography for photographs that revealed the effects of war on the people of Lebanon. In 1985, he won again, receiving the Pulitzer in Feature Photography for his images of famine in Ethiopia and illegal immigration on the border of Mexico. He was a 1992 Nieman Fellow.

Henson is associate vice president and editor at large at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, where she lectures in journalism. In 1992, Henson won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for a series of editorials, published in the Lexington Herald-Leader, about battered women in Kentucky. Henson’s work incited a statewide discussion about domestic violence and prompted legislative reforms. She was a 1994 Nieman Fellow. @MARIAHENSON

Jordan is a national correspondent for The Washington Post covering the 2016 presidential campaign. She served as the co-bureau chief of the Post’s London, Mexico City, and Tokyo bureaus and was the head of content for Washington Post Live, which organizes forums and debates. Jordan won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting with Kevin Sullivan for exposing horrific conditions in Mexico’s criminal justice system. She was a 1990 Nieman Fellow. @marycjordan

Keller is a former cultural critic at the Chicago Tribune. She won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for a three-part narrative series about the aftermath of a deadly tornado in Utica, Illinois. Her latest novel, “Sorrow Road,” is the fifth in a series set in her home state of West Virginia. She has taught at University of Chicago, University of Notre Dame, and Princeton University. She was a 1998 Nieman Fellow.

Komunyakaa is Distinguished Senior Poet in New York University’s graduate creative writing program. He received the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for “Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989.” He gained recognition for “Copacetic,” a 1984 collection of poems built from colloquial speech. He served in the U.S. Army from 1969 to 1970 as a correspondent with the Southern Cross in Vietnam. His collection “Dien Cai Dau” portrays the war. He is New York State Poet Laureate.

Lipinski is curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. She previously served as editor in chief and senior vice president of the Chicago Tribune, where she won a 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism for stories she wrote with two other reporters on municipal corruption. She was vice president for civic engagement and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. She is past co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board and was a 1990 Nieman Fellow. @AMLwhere

is artistic director of Voices Boston, a performing arts program for children, and music director of the Bach, Beethoven, & Brahms Society. He formerly was director of the Boston Classical Orchestra and the Springfield Symphony Chorus and guest conductor with Chorus pro Musica, Emmanuel Music, and Boston Cecilia. He has prepared symphonic choruses for Robert Shaw and Seiji Ozawa and conducted for Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Ballet, and the Boston Pops.

is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book, “Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam,” won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History. A specialist on U.S. foreign relations history and modern international history, he was previously the Anbinder Professor of History at Cornell University.

Lowery is a national reporter at The Washington Post who covers law enforcement, justice, race, and politics. After covering the violence in Ferguson, Mo., following the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown, Lowery suggested the paper develop a national database of fatal shootings by police. That database and a series of stories, including some by Lowery, were recognized with a 2016 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting. He previously worked for The Boston Globe. @WesleyLowery

Miranda is a composer, lyricist, and performer who wrote and starred in the musical “Hamilton,” winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and 11 Tony Awards. His first Broadway musical, “In the Heights,” co-written with Quiara Alegría Hudes, was a Pulitzer finalist in 2009. It won four Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Score. He is the recipient of a 2015 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” @Lin_Manuel

Marsalis is an internationally acclaimed musician, composer, bandleader, and educator. He made history in 1997, when his oratorio “Blood on the Fields” became the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He has recorded more than 80 jazz and classical recordings, which have won him nine Grammy awards and sold over 7 million copies worldwide. He serves as the managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and director of Jazz Studies at the Juilliard School in New York City. @wyntonmarsalis

Nottage is a playwright who won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for “Ruined,” about the plight of girls and women in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. Before writing the play, she traveled to Uganda to interview females affected by war. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama and in the theater department at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Nottage is the recipient of a 2007 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” @Lynnbrooklyn

Pfeiffer covers nonprofits, philanthropy, and wealth for The Boston Globe. She was a member of the Spotlight investigative team that documented clergy sex abuse, which earned The Boston Globe the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. She has been senior reporter and host of WBUR’s “All Things Considered” and “Radio Boston,” and a host of NPR’s “On Point” and “Here & Now.” Pfeiffer was a John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University. @SachaPfeiffer

Poitras is a filmmaker, journalist, and artist. Her film “Citizenfour,” about Edward Snowden and the NSA’s mass surveillance, won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. Her reporting on the Snowden disclosures shared in the joint Guardian-Washington Post 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Her exhibition “Astro Noise” was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A recipient of a 2012 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” she is co-creator of Field of Vision film unit.

Robinson is a politics and culture columnist for The Washington Post. His columns about the election of the nation’s first African-American president won a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. In a three-decade career at the Post, he has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent, and editor in charge of the Style section. He is the author of “Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America,” among other books. He was a 1988 Nieman Fellow. @Eugene_Robinson

Warrick is a national security reporter for The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1996. He is the author of “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS,” which was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Warrick and two colleagues wrote a series of articles on the environmental and health risks posed by North Carolina’s hog industry that won The (Raleigh) News and Observer the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. @JobyWarrick

Woodward is associate editor at The Washington Post. He and fellow Post reporter Carl Bernstein’s reporting on the Watergate scandal led to President Nixon’s resignation and the award of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service to the Post. In 2002, the paper won a Pulitzer for National Reporting for its 9/11 coverage, of which Woodward was the lead reporter. He has authored or co-authored 18 bestselling books, most of which focus on seats of power in D.C. @realBobWoodward

Wright is an author and a staff writer for The New Yorker. His book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. His other books include “The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State” and “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief.” He also is a playwright and has written and performed two one-man shows, including “My Trip to al-Qaeda.” @lawrence_wright

Yankovskaya is guest chorus conductor for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Born in Russia, she is the artistic director with Juventas New Music Ensemble and conductor with Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras. Her recent engagements include Beth Morrison Projects, American Lyric Theater, Opera Saratoga, the Cabrillo Festival, the Center for Contemporary Opera in NYC, Flagstaff Symphony Orchestra, and Dallas Opera’s Institute for Women Conductors. @LidiyaConductor