Soledad O’Brien, anchor and special correspondent for CNN: Special Investigations Unit, will deliver a talk, "Diversity: On TV, Behind the Scenes and in Our Lives," 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 14, in Langford Auditorium at Vanderbilt University.
The lecture is part of the North Star Leadership Series sponsored by the Office of Leadership Development and Intercultural Affairs at Vanderbilt.
General admission tickets are $10 for the public and are available through Ticketmaster at www.ticketmaster.com, at the Sarratt Student Center box office on Vanderbilt’s campus and at the door. Tickets are free to Vanderbilt students, faculty and staff at the Sarratt box office. Only one free ticket may be picked up per person with Vanderbilt identification card. Tickets are $5 for non-Vanderbilt students with valid school or university identification – these tickets are also available at the Sarratt box office.
For CNN’s Special Investigations Unit, O’Brien reports hour-long documentaries throughout the year and files in-depth series on ongoing and breaking news stories for all major CNN programs. She also covers political news as part of CNN’s political team.
Most recently, she reported for CNN Presents: Black in America, an on-air and digital initiative revealing the current state of black America 40 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The program features six hours of documentaries and weekly reports about the real lives behind the stereotypes, statistics and identity politics that frequently frame the national dialogue about black America.
O’Brien joined CNN in July 2003 as the co-anchor of the network’s flagship morning program, American Morning. Her reporting following Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Phuket, Thailand, earned her numerous awards and critical acclaim.
She also covered the London terrorism attacks in July 2005 as well as the late count of Ohio’s contested electoral votes in November 2004. Earlier that fall, she anchored the live coverage of the burial of Yasser Arafat. In fall 2003, O’Brien was the only broadcast journalist permitted to travel with first lady Laura Bush on her trip to Moscow.
O’Brien came to CNN from NBC News where she had anchored the network’s Weekend Today since July 1999. During that time, she contributed reports for the weekday Today show and weekend editions of NBC Nightly News and covered such notable stories as John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane crash and the school shootings in Colorado and Oregon. In 2003, she covered the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and later anchored NBC’s weekend coverage of the war in Iraq. Additionally, in 1998, she traveled to Cuba to cover Pope John Paul II’s historic visit.
In 2007, O’Brien garnered a Gracie Allen Award for her reporting from Cyprus on the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict as well as her reports from the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. The NAACP honored her with its President’s Award in recognition of her humanitarian efforts and journalistic excellence, and this year she received the first "Soledad O’Brien Freedom’s Voice Award" created in her honor by Community Voices at the Morehouse School of Medicine. The award, which will be given each year, honors mid-career professionals who serve as catalysts for social change within their fields.
O’Brien was part of the coverage teams that earned CNN a George Foster Peabody Award for its Katrina coverage and an Alfred I. duPont Award for its coverage of the tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia. In 2006, the National Urban League awarded her its Women of Power award. She is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
She is a graduate of Harvard University with a degree in English and American literature.
Media Contact: Princine Lewis, (615) 322-NEWS
princine.lewis@vanderbilt.edu