In celebration of Women’s History Month, the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication will present “Women’s Voices: an Evening with Cynthia Tucker and Isabel Wilkerson” at 5 p.m. March 26 in the North Psychology-Journalism Auditorium.
Tucker is a 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner and editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Wilkerson is a 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winner and James M. Cox Professor of Journalism at Emory University.
Tucker and Wilkerson will engage in a wide-ranging conversation, discussing their trajectories as journalists, their friendship, the Pulitzer Prize and its impact on their careers, and, more generally, the crucial contributions that women continue to make in media industries.
The evening also will feature a presentation of the winners of the Women’s Voices Essay Contest. Student journalists from Athens’ Clarke Central and Cedar Shoals high schools were asked to submit essays about a female journalist who has made a positive mark on the field and on society. Winners will be selected by the Grady College Diversity Committee.
Tucker is a syndicated columnist whose commentary appears in more than 70 newspapers around the country. Tucker’s weekly column, “As I See It,” is distributed by Universal Press Syndicate. In her capacity as editorial page editor, Tucker is responsible for guiding the development of the Journal-Constitution’s opinion policies on everything from foreign policy issues to local school board races. Tucker also has considerable reporting experience. She has covered local governments, national politics, crime and education. She has filed dispatches from Africa, Central America and Cuba. She is also a frequent television commentator.
Wilkerson was the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer for journalism. At the time, she was the Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times, where she spent much of her career. Wilkerson specializes in a kind of writing and research that is both ethnographic and journalistic in approach, which requires near-total immersion in the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, in an effort to see the world through their eyes. She is currently completing a book on the migration of African Americans from the South to the North, from the Depression to the 1960s, and their 21st century return to the South.
The Women’s Voices Lecture is sponsored by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication Diversity Committee. Its purpose is to recognize and highlight the multifaceted and central contributions made by women to journalistic and artistic organizations and expression. The inaugural 2007 lecture featured award-winning authors Valerie Boyd and Evelyn White discussing their highly regarded biographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, respectively.
