Newsroom

Coll to Discuss Bin Ladens Oct. 22

The program, sponsored by the Marie S. Young International Affairs Lectureship, will begin with an 11:30 a.m. reception followed by lunch and remarks at 12 noon at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.

Coll is president and CEO of the New America Foundation—a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States—and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously, he spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at The Washington Post, serving as the paper’s managing editor from 1998 to 2004.

Coll won the first of his two Pulitzers for explanatory journalism in 1990 for his series, with David A. Vise, about the Securities and Exchange Commission, which the two turned into a book, Eagle on the Street (1991). His second was awarded in 2005 for his book Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, which also won the Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations, the Overseas Press Club’s Cornelius Ryan Award for best nonfiction book on international affairs, and the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book published on international affairs.

Other awards include the 1992 Livingston Award for outstanding foreign reporting; the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award for his coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone; and a second Overseas Press Club Award for international magazine writing. Coll graduated Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude, from Occidental, with a degree in English and history. An Occidental trustee, he lives with his wife, Susan (Keselenko) Coll ’81, and their three children in Washington, D.C.

The Millennium Biltmore Hotel is located at 506 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. Tickets are $45; $30 for current members of the President's Circle and Founders Court, and for members of Oxy GOLD (Graduates of the Last Decade). For more information or to RSVP, please contact Amy Reyes at (323) 259-1456 or events@oxy.edu. Please RSVP by Oct. 15.