Elie Wiesel - April 25, 2007 | www.eliewieselfoundation.org
Nobel Peace Prize winner and Boston University Professor Elie Wiesel has worked on behalf of oppressed people for much of his adult life. His personal experience of the Holocaust has led him to use his talents as an author, teacher and storyteller to defend human rights and peace throughout the world.
Wiesel's efforts have earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Liberty Award, the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor, and in 1986, the Nobel Peace Prize. He has received more than one hundred and ten honorary degrees from institutions of higher learning in the United States, Europe and Israel.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed him Chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust. In 1980 he became Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. Elie Wiesel is also the Founding President of the Paris-based Universal Academy of Cultures.
His more than forty-five books have won numerous awards, including the Prix Medicis for A Beggar in Jerusalem, the Prix Livre Inter for The Testament and the Grand Prize for Literature from the City of Paris for The Fifth Son. The first volume of Wiesel's memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea, was published in New York (Knopf) in December, 1995. The second volume, And the Sea is Never Full, followed the first in November, 1999. His latest book is Un desir fou de danser, a novel; his most recent nonfiction work is Wise Men and Their Tales.
Elie Wiesel was born in the town of Sighet in Transylvania (Romania, from 1940-45 Hungary). He was fifteen years old when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister perished there; his two older sisters survived. Wiesel and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where his father died before the camp was liberated in 1945.
Nicholas Kristof - October 1, 2007 (Aiken Lecture Series) | learn.uvm.edu/aiken, Kristof's Blog
Nicholas D. Kristof, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, writes columns for the New York Times that appear each Sunday and Tuesday. He was one of the first to call attention to genocide in Darfur and has visited that region nine times in an effort to call attention to the crisis. He was also an early opponent of the Iraq War and is well-known as an advocate of women's rights in the developing world. In particular he has helped lead the fight against sex trafficking in countries such as Cambodia, India and Pakistan. Born on April 27, 1959, Nicholas Kristof grew up on a cherry farm near Yamhill, Oregon, and raised sheep for his Future Farmers of America project. He graduated from Harvard College in three years, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1981, and then won first class honors in his study of law at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. 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 well over 100 countries. He has had unpleasant experiences with malaria, mobs, war and an African airplane crash. Nicholas Kristof joined The New York Times in October 1984, initially covering economics. After that, he served as a business correspondent based in Los Angeles, Hong Kong bureau chief, Beijing bureau chief and Tokyo bureau chief. 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." Before taking up the column, Mr. Kristof was associate managing editor of the Times, responsible for Sunday editions. 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, and Mr. Kristof won again in 2006 for his coverage of Darfur and other humanitarian issues. Nicholas Kristof has won many other prizes including the George Polk Award, the Overseas Press Club award, the Michael Kelly Award and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award. Nicholas Kristof, who was the first blogger in the New York Times, has been active on-line and still blogs at www.nytimes.com/ontheground. He has an annual contest to choose a university student to take with him on a reporting trip to the developing world. 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. Nicholas Kristof enjoys running, backpacking in the Oregon Cascades, and having his Chinese and Japanese corrected by his children.