[NEohioPAL] Thomas E. Ricks, Pentagon Correspondent -- Cleveland Public Library, March 2

[clevelandpubliclibrary@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Thomas E. Ricks, Pentagon Correspondent for The Washington Post and author of the New York Times best-selling book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, will speak at Cleveland Public Library’s Writers and Readers Series, Sunday, March 2, 2:00 p.m. Free and open to the public, the event will take place at the Main Library, Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium, E. 6^th Street and Superior Avenue.

As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal for seventeen years, Ricks covered military conflicts, defense, and national security issues. He has spent a great deal of his professional life in war zones and has reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey and Afghanistan. He was part of a Wall Street Journal team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles on the challenges the U.S. military will face in the 21^st century.

Ricks wrote the New York Times best-selling Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006), following five tours reporting on the conflict in that war-torn country. Ricks is also the author of Making the Corps (1997), the account of a Parris Island boot camp platoon. His highly regarded first novel, A Soldier’s Duty (2001), is about a peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan gone tragically wrong.

Ricks, a graduate of Yale University, has been with The Washington Post for seven years. He lives with his family in suburban Washington, D.C. For more information, visit www.cpl.org or call (216) 623-2800.