Award-winning journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault presides at Cleveland Public Library’s Writers and Readers Series, Sunday, February 17, 2:00 p.m. Free and open to the public, the event will take place at the Main Library, Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium, E. 6th Street and Superior Avenue.
Hunter-Gault, born in Due West, South Carolina, made civil rights history as the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Georgia in 1962. Her 1992 memoir, In My Place, tells the story of those difficult years and describes both the harassment she experienced and the support she received from family and others in the Civil Rights Movement.
She began her career in 1963 as a reporter for The New Yorker, where she wrote for the “Talk of the Town” section of the magazine. In 1968, she went to work as an investigative reporter and anchorwoman on local New York television and later joined the New York Times as a metropolitan reporter specializing in coverage of the urban African American community.
Hunter-Gault joined the MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1978 and served as chief national correspondent for The Newshour with Jim Lehrer on PBS from 1983 to 1997. During that time Hunter-Gault won two Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcast journalism for her work on the series “Apartheid’s People.” She joined CNN in 1997 as chief correspondent in Africa and in 1999 became the CNN bureau chief in Johannesburg, South Africa, a post she held until 2007.
Based on her lectures at Harvard, Hunter-Gault published New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa’s Renaissance (2006). She received the Sidney Hillman Award, the Good Housekeeping Broadcast Personality of the Year Award, the American Women in Radio and Television Award, and awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She has also been published in The New York Times Magazine, Saturday Review, Essence, and Vogue. For more information, visit www.cpl.org or call (216) 623-2800.