Sheri Fink, Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist and Author, to Deliver Fishback Visiting Writer Lecture at W&L
Sheri Fink, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author who has reported on health care crises around the world, will deliver this year’s Fishback Visiting Writer lecture at Washington and Lee University on March 30 at 5 p.m. in the Stackhouse Theater in Elrod Commons.
Her talk, “Reporting on Global and Local Health Care Emergencies: The Trauma Narrative in the Age of the Tweet,” is free and open to the public. The lecture is co-sponsored by the Journalism Department and the Roger Mudd Center for Ethics.
Fink is the author of “Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital,” which documents patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital after Hurricane Katrina. In this facility, conditions deteriorated so drastically that caregivers chose to designate certain patients as among the last to be rescued. The book was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, the Ridenhour Book Prize and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, among many others.
A former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones, Fink received her M.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her first book, “War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival,” describes the work and struggles of medical professionals during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
She is a correspondent at The New York Times. Earlier this year, she was among a group of Times reporters who won the prestigious George Polk Award for health reporting of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
The Fishback Fund for Visiting Writers is endowed by Sara and William H. Fishback Jr., Class of 1956, in memory of his parents. The fund brings an outstanding writer to the W&L campus annually who delivers a public lecture to the Lexington-Rockbridge community.
Previous Fishback Visiting Writers have included author and journalist Michael Sokolove, PBS host Ray Suarez, New Yorker writer Jane Mayer, author and journalist Steve Coll, sociologist Alan Wolfe, political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain, author and legal scholar Stephen Carter, political scientist Larry Sabato, columnist and Brookings Institution Fellow E. J. Dionne and author Robert Kaplan.
