Alissa Rubin, a foreign correspondent and current Paris bureau chief for The New York Times, will be the recipient of Colby College’s Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award in a ceremony Monday honoring her work in international journalism.
Rubin, a 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner, will receive the award recognizing courageous journalism and deliver the 2016 Lovejoy Convocation address at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Lorimer Chapel.
The award, presented annually since 1952, is named for Elijah Parish Lovejoy, an Albion native, Colby graduate and journalist who was killed by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois in 1837 as they fought against his work for an abolitionist newspaper.
“Alissa Rubin illuminates the lives of real human beings behind the headlines, from the residents of women’s shelters in Afghanistan, to the workers at an Iraqi morgue,” Colby President David Greene said in a news release. “Honoring her work through the Lovejoy Award offers our students and broader community an opportunity to learn through her remarkable experiences.”
Past recipients of the Lovejoy award have included New York Times investigative reporter and author James Risen, who received the award in 2014; and Katherine Boo, a Washington Post reporter recognized in 2000 with the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, who received the Lovejoy award in 2015.
Also on Monday, Colby will host an exhibit and discussion on the work of three international photographers whose work reflects the themes of Rubin’s reporting, the release said. Titled “Capturing War: Images of Conflict, Upheaval and Revolution,” the exhibit will feature images from Carol Guzy, a four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist for The Washington Post; Andrea Bruce, a freelance photographer based in Afghanistan; and Nina Berman, a documentary photographer and associate professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
The exhibit will be at Colby’s Diamond building, where the photographers will talk about their work during a reception at 4 p.m.
Both the convocation address and exhibit Monday at Colby College are free and open to the public.
Rubin is a graduate of Brown University and previously worked as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in the Balkans, where she covered Macedonia and post-conflict stresses in the former Yugoslavia, according to the release from Colby.
She is being honored for her “intrepid reporting — often at great personal peril — in hotspots around the globe,” it said.
In 2014, Rubin was injured severely in a helicopter accident while reporting in Iraq on the takeover of northern Iraq by the Islamic state.
In addition to receiving the Lovejoy award next week, she also will receive the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting in a ceremony at Columbia University. She is being recognized for her work documenting the abuse and injustice faced by women in Afghanistan.
Rachel Ohm — 612-2368
Twitter: @rachel_ohm
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