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Alumni Inaugural Reception in Washington, D.C. Jan. 19
To celebrate the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama ’83, the Occidental College Alumni Association will be hosting a Jan. 19 reception in Washington, D.C. for all local alumni and other Oxy graduates who will be in town for the historic ceremony.
The 5 p.m. event at the DACOR Bacon House, 1801 F Street, NW, will feature a talk by former Washington Post managing editor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Steve Coll ’80 on “What to Expect From the Obama Administration.” He will be introduced by Occidental President Robert Skotheim.
Coll is president and CEO of the New America Foundation—a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute—and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously, he spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at the Post, serving as managing editor from 1998 to 2004. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize, first for his 1990 reporting on the Securities Exchange Commission, and his second for his 2004 book, Ghost Wars . His latest book is The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century.
Coll’s wife, novelist Susan (Keselenko) Coll ’81, had a circle of friends at Occidental that “included a guy from Hawaii named Barry Obama,” Coll recalled in a Nov. 4 New Yorker blog post. “He was then more or less what he seems now, and he was just as impressive.”
For further information and to RSVP, contact the Office of Alumni Relations at (323) 259-2601.
Related links:
Barack Obama '83 Elected President
Oxy Remembers "Barry" Obama '83
Obama '83, Oxy Campaigners Set Sights on Next Caucuses