Department of English

• Monday, March 11, 2024 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm

Kelly Writers House | 3805 Locust Walk

Join us for a conversation with Maureen Dowd and Ashley Parker (C’05) hosted by professor Paul Hendrickson. Dowd is a Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist for the New York Times; Ashley Parker a Pulitzer-Prize winning Senior National Political Correspondent for the Washington Post; and Paul Hendrickson, faculty member, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and former Washington Post reporter. These three have a long, fruitful history of mentorship, learning, and friendship – Parker was once Dowd's research assistant and Hendrickson was Parker's professor. This will be an amazing opportunity to get a rare, inside look at the work of some exceptional journalists. We hope to see you there.

Please register here to attend in person.

Masks are welcome. Please stay home if you feel ill.  

MAUREEN DOWD
Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary and author of three New York Times best sellers, became a New York Times Op-Ed columnist in 1995. In August 2014, she also became a writer for The Times Magazine. Born in Washington, Ms. Dowd began her journalism career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for The Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter and feature writer. In 1983, she joined The New York Times as a metropolitan correspondent and then moved to the Washington bureau in 1986 to cover politics. Ms. Dowd has covered nine presidential campaigns, served as The Times’s White House correspondent, and written “On Washington,” a column for The Times Magazine. In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, G. P. Putnam published her first book, Bushworld, which covered the presidency and personality of George W. Bush. After Bushworld quickly climbed the best-seller list, Ms. Dowd switched from presidential politics to sexual politics in another best seller, Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide, released in 2005. Her third book, The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics, was released in 2016. In addition to The New York Times, Ms. Dowd has written for GQ, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Mademoiselle, Sports Illustrated and others. Ms. Dowd received her undergraduate degree from Catholic University, and, in 2023, her Master's Degree in English Literature from Columbia University.

ASHLEY PARKER 
Ashley Parker (C’05) is senior national political correspondent for the Washington Post, and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Most recently, she served as the White House bureau chief, covering the first two years of the Biden presidency, as well as the entirety of the Trump presidency. In 2022, she was part of the Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, for their coverage of the causes, costs and aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. She was part of the Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2018, for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. She was also part of the Washington Post team that won the George Polk Award for national reporting in 2022, for the project “The Attack,” which chronicled the January 6 attack. In 2019, Parker served as one of the moderators for the Democratic presidential primary debate in Atlanta, hosted by the Washington Post and MSNBC. Parker joined the Post in 2017, after 11 years at the New York Times, where she covered the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns, and Congress, among other things. She is an NBC/MSNBC senior political analyst, and has also written for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Glamour, and The Washingtonian, as well as other publications. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005, with a degree in both English (creative writing) and Communications, and lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, New York Times political correspondent Mike Bender, and their three daughters.

PAUL HENDRICKSON
Paul Hendrickson is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner of it once--for his 2003 Sons of Mississippi. His The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War was a 1996 finalist for the National Book Award. His 2011 Hemingway's Boat was both a New York Times and London best-seller. He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Since 1998 he has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania, and for two decades before that he was a staff writer at The Washington Post. In 2009 he was a joint visiting professor of documentary practice at Duke University and of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives with his wife, Cecilia, a retired nurse, outside Philadelphia and in Washington, D.C.