University Park, Pa. -- Two award-winning journalists will deliver free public lectures during the spring 2008 Foster Conference of Distinguished Writers at Penn State.
The lectures, which bring distinguished writers to the University Park campus to share their experiences with students, faculty and the public, are scheduled Tuesday, March 4, and Wednesday, March 5. Both events will be in the HUB-Robeson Center Auditorium.
Dana Priest will speak at 7 p.m. March 4. Priest has worked nearly 20 years for The Washington Post and has written extensively on the military, counterterrorism and the CIA. She won a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on secret CIA prisons in foreign countries. In 2007, she and Anne Hull of The Post broke the story about how Walter Reed Army Medical Center was neglecting the treatment of troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, which led to immediate reforms. She is the author of a book, "The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America's Military" (2003, W. W. Norton & Co.).
Jim Wooten will speak at 10:10 a.m. March 5. Wooten has reported for ABC News since 1979, covering wars in Iraq, the Balkans, El Salvador, Lebanon and Nicaragua; racial unrest in South Africa; and genocide in Rwanda. His reporting has been honored with the Overseas Press Club Award, the Joe Alex Morris Award, the John Chancellor Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Award. He has written four books. Before beginning his television career, he was a White House correspondent for The New York Times and a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
In 1997, Larry Foster, a 1948 Penn State graduate, and his wife, Ellen Miller Foster, a 1949 graduate, gave $500,000 to endow the Foster Professorship in Communications. The program was designed to support new strategies for improving students' writing skills and enables the University to host the annual Foster Conference of Distinguished Writers series.
In addition to the series, the couple endowed the Larry and Ellen Foster Communications Librarian and funded the Foster Auditorium, a tiered 134-seat facility in the Patter Library designed to support library instruction and programming. They also provided the lead gift for renovations to the Carnegie Building, home of Penn State's College of Communications.