helen benedict
Helen Benedict is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of four novels and four books of nonfiction. She is currently at work on the nonfiction book The Lonely Soldier: Women at War in Iraq, to be published by Beacon Press in March 2009, and has just won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism (2008) for this work.
Her newest novel, The Opposite of Love (Viking, 2007), concerns race and the moral dilemmas involved in trying to rescue a child. Her other novels are The Sailor's Wife, set in Greece after the fall of the junta; Bad Angel , about Dominican-Americans in New York, and A World Like This, about a teenager in prison in England. Her most recent nonfiction book is Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes (Oxford), and she has also written Recovery: How to Survive Sexual Assault, and Safe, Strong, and Streetwise.
In addition to being a professor of journalism, Helen has taught novel writing at the Auvillar and Paris Writer’s Workshops, and journalism at U.C. Berkeley. Her essays and book reviews have been frequently anthologized, and have been published in the New York Times, The Nation, The Washington Post, Salon, and elsewhere. Her novels have received citations for best book of the year from The L.A. Times and the Chicago and New York Public Libraries, and she has been granted fellowships from the Yaddo, MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Arts, and Cummington Community of the Arts.
Helen has recently lectured at venues such as Western Kentucky University, Hunter College, The New York Bar Association, Columbia University. Over the last year, she has been featured on ABC News, Democracy Now, The Roseanne Barr Radio Show, Weekend America, NPR's Day to Day, Chicago Public Radio WBEZ's Worldview, and NPR's Here and Now, among many others.
Born in England of American parents, she has lived in London, Mauritius, Seychelles, Paris and California, but now resides in New York.
Speech titles include:
The Lonely Soldier: Women at War in Iraq
The Silent War of Women Soldiers
Women at War, Iraq, and Military Culture
Military Culture vs. Women
Why Women Soldiers are Invisible
Narrative Journalism: The Art of Entering Other’s Lives
Where fiction and nonfiction meet: the role of imagination in journalism.
www.helenbenedict.com
For more speakers on feminist journalism, see: Paula Kamen, Jennifer Baumgardner, Lisa Jervis, Farai Chideya, Irshad Manji, Courtney E. Martin
For more speakers on war and peace, see: Periel Aschenbrand, Katha Pollitt
For more speakers on sexual assault, see: Angela Rose, Loretta Ross, Jennifer Baumgardner
