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W&L Hosts “A Conversation with Jane Mayer,” Author and Writer for The New Yorker

“A Conversation with Jane Mayer,” author and staff writer for The New Yorker will be held at Washington and Lee University on Thursday, Jan. 21, at 5 p.m. in Stackhouse Theater in the Elrod Commons.

The title of the conversation, which is free and open to the public, is The Dark Side: How the U.S. Became Enmeshed in Detainees, Water-Boarding and War Crimes Liability. Mayer will initially take questions from the moderator, Robert Strong, associate provost at W&L, and then from the audience.

Mayer will talk about her newest book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (2008). It was a Critics Circle and a National Book Award finalist and one of the “Best Books of the Year” from Salon, Slate, The Economist, the Washington Post and The New York Times. She also is the co-author of Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (1994) and Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988 (1989).

Mayer worked for The Wall Street Journal, during which time she was a White House correspondent, senior writer and front page editor. She also served as a war correspondent and foreign correspondent for the Journal reporting on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the last days of Communism in the former Soviet Union. Mayer was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize for feature-writing.

She has also contributed to the New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and American Prospect. She has appeared as a guest on The David Letterman Show, the Bill Moyers Journal and the Colbert Report, among others.

Mayer was awarded the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism, the Ridenhour Book Prize, the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism and in 2008 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Mayer’s visit is sponsored by the Johnson Lecture Series and the Fishback Fund for Visiting Writers.