INTREPID NPR REPORTER TO GIVE COMMENCEMENT SPEECH

Anne Garrels, an award-winning foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, will be the keynote speaker at Bryn Mawr College's Class of 2005 Commencement Convocation on Saturday, May 14.

Garrels gained international recognition in 2003 as one of the few U.S. journalists to remain in Iraq during the bombing of Baghdad. Her reporting from the Palestine Hotel gave a human voice to a city under siege. For her work in Iraq, Garrels won a 2003 Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation.

"I wasn't looking for the wars. The wars found me," Garrels says of her career, which has placed her on the front lines from Tiananmen Square to the Middle East. In her 2003 book Naked in Baghdad, she explains why she chooses to live her life in war-torn regions. "I'm not really very interested in the strictly military part of war. Rather I'm fascinated by how people survive, and how the process of war affects the attitudes of all sides involved, and how they pull out of it."

Journalism was not Garrels' ambition when she graduated from Harvard University in 1972. She started as a producer for ABC television in New York. But her passion for Russian history, language and culture made her a natural choice when ABC needed a foreign correspondent in Moscow. After serving as Moscow bureau chief and correspondent for three years, she reported on the rise of Solidarity in Poland, and from 1984-85 was the network's Central American correspondent. Since 9/11, Garrels has reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East.

Garrels, who joined NPR in 1988, was part of the team that won a prestigious Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award (the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) in 1992 for covering the first Gulf War. In 1996, she won the duPont-Columbia Award for her coverage of the former Soviet Union. The Overseas Press Club presented Garrels with the Whitman Bassow Award for a series she did on water issues around the globe.

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