Forum Network

New York Times reporter Chris Hedges is author and 20-year war correspondent who shared the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of global terrorism. In his 20 years as a journalist for many of the most respected news organizations in the United States, Hedges has reported from the world's most war-ravaged regions, from the Middle East and Central America to the Balkans and the Persian Gulf. For more than a decade, Hedges covered hot spots for *The New York Times*, first in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm, then in Bosnia and Kosovo from 1995-98, and more recently in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2002, he was part of a team of *Times* reporters that were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for the paper's 2001 coverage of terrorism. The winner of numerous other awards for his coverage, he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.

Lois E. Horton teaches in the UH Department of American Studies and serves as Professor of History at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Horton is co-author of several books with James Oliver Horton, including Slavery and the Making of America (2004), Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America (2001), In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (1997) and Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (1979; 1999). Horton received her PhD from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Her work on African-American communities, race, gender, and social change has been published in the US and Europe, and she has lectured extensively around the world.

Joseph Tovares is the Executive Producer of La Plaza, the Latino production unit at WGBH/Boston. Tovares has editorial supervision over all La Plaza productions local, national, specials and interactive including the nationally distributed series, Maria Hinojosa: One-On-One. Prior to his work at La Plaza, Tovares was the Series Editor at *American Experience*. Mr. Tovares is the producer of *Zoot Suit Riots*, a one-hour film for American Experience about Mexican American youth in 1942 Los Angeles who dared to challenged the unwritten social codes of wartime LA and paid a heavy price. Mr. Tovares is also the producer of *Remember the Alamo*, a film about the Mexican community in Texas in the years leading up to the battle of the Alamo and the war for Texas independence. A native of San Antonio, Texas, Tovares is a graduate of the School of Public Communication at Boston University and holds a master's degree in Radio-Television-Film from the College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.

Giovanna Negretti is the founding Executive Director of Oeste? (Translation: Have You Heard?), the first and only statewide Latino political organization in Massachusetts. Oeste? is a membership organization with a mission to promote the principles and practice of democracy and to advance the political, social and economic standing of Latinos and Latinas in the state. Oeste? offers programs in leadership development, civic education, campaign training and advocacy. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Giovanna arrived to Massachusetts in 1992. She began her local political work serving as a legislative aide to State Senator Dianne Wilkerson and Senior Advisor to the Joint Committee on Insurance. Simultaneously, she served as President of the Massachusetts Chapter of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, an organization which advocates for civil rights of Puerto Ricans in the United States while promoting independence for Puerto Rico. On a national level, Giovanna is part of the Executive Committees of the National Boricua Human Rights Network, Boricua Initiative, Santiago's List and the Fannie Lou Hamer Project. She has coordinated rallies and demonstrations in Washington DC, including March for Amnesty for the Puerto Rican Political Prisoners (1997); A Un Siglo de Invasion, Marcha Nuestra Nacion (1998); and the National Day of Solidarity With the People of Vieques (2000) and the March for Legalization of Immigrants (2002). Giovanna has also coordinated several humanitarian delegations to Central America and South America and the Caribbean. Giovanna was listed by Boston Magazine as one of 40 Bostonians to Watch (June 2002) and as one of the 100 Most Powerful Women in Boston (May 2003). She graduated from Emerson College with a BFA, magna cum laude, is a fellow of the National Hispana Leadership Institute and has a MPA with a concentration in Leadership from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

James Oliver Horton is a distinguished professor of American Studies and History. He has published ten books, most recently The Landmarks of African American History in 2005, Slavery and the Making of America (Oxford University Press, 2004) the companion book for the WNET PBS series of the same which aired in February of 2005 and Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, edited in 2006 with Lois E. Horton. James Horton has been historical consultant to, and appeared in, numerous film and video productions including those seen on ABC, PBS, The Discovery Channels, C-Span TV, and The History Channel. In 2006 Professor Horton was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the George Washington University President's Medal for scholarly achievement and teaching excellence.

MacQuarrie is a general assignment reporter for the *Boston Globe* "City & Region" section. In 1999, MacQuarrie won a prize for Writing and Reporting from the National Headliner Awards. In addition, he was an embedded reporter during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

George Packer is a staff writer for *The New Yorker* and the author, most recently, of *The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq*. That book, which traced America's entry into the Iraq war and the subsequent troubled occupation, won the Overseas Press Club's 2005 Cornelius Ryan Award and the Helen Bernstein Book Award of the New York Public Library, was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, and was named by *The New York Times* as one of the ten best books of the 2005. Packer has published two other works of non-fiction, *The Village of Waiting*, (1988), a memoir about his years in the Peace Corps in West Africa, and *Blood of the Liberals* (2000), a three-generational political history, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He has also published two novels, *The Half Man *(1991) and *Central Square*(1998), and was the editor of *The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World* (2003). His articles, essays, and reviews on foreign affairs, American politics, and literature have appeared in *The New York Times Magazine*, *Harper's*, *Dissent*, and other publications. He received the 2006 Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting from Georgetown and his magazine reporting has won three Overseas Press Club awards. He was a 2001-2 Guggenheim fellow and has taught writing at Harvard, Bennington, and Columbia. He lives in Brooklyn.

Elaine Scarry, a professor of English and American Literature and Language, is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests include Theory of Representation, the Language of Physical Pain and Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art, Science and the Law. She is the author of* The Body in Pain* which is known as a definitive study of pain and inflicting pain. She argues that physical pain leads to destruction and the unmaking of the human world, whereas human creation at the opposite end of the spectrum leads to the making of the world. Her 1999 study, "Dreaming by the Book" won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. In 1998, Elaine Scarry, a non-scientist, authored an article "The Fall of TWA 800: The Possibility of Electromagnetic Interference" which appeared in *The New York Review of Books*.