C.J. Chivers | |
---|---|
Born | Christopher John Chivers 1964 (age 59–60) |
Alma mater | Cornell University, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism |
Occupation(s) | Journalist, Marine |
Agent | Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency |
Notable credit(s) | The New York Times , Esquire , Foreign Affairs , Wired , Providence Journal , Field & Stream , Salt Water Sportsman , Surfer 2007 Michael Kelly Award winner |
Spouse | Suzanne Keating |
Children | five |
Military career | |
Allegiance | United States |
Service/ | United States Marine Corps |
Years of service | 1988-1994 |
Rank | Captain |
Unit | USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63) |
Battles/wars | Gulf War 1992 Los Angeles riots |
Website | cjchivers |
Christopher John Chivers (born 1964) is an American journalist and author best known for his work with The New York Times and Esquire magazine. [1] [2] He is currently assigned to The New York Times Magazine and the newspaper's Investigations Desk as a long-form writer and investigative reporter. In the summer of 2007, he was named the newspaper's Moscow bureau chief, replacing Steven Lee Myers.
Along with several reporters and photographers based in Pakistan and Afghanistan, he contributed to a New York Times staff entry that received the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2009. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2017. His book, The Gun , a work of history published under the Simon & Schuster imprint, was released in October 2010. Chivers is considered one of the most important war correspondents of his generation, noted for his expertise on weapons. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Chivers attended the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University. There he played defensive line for sprint football for four years, and was a member of Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. After graduating in January 1988, Chivers served as an infantry officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. He graduated from the United States Army's Ranger School, served in the first Gulf War and in peacekeeping operations during the Los Angeles riots in 1992 before being honorably discharged as a captain in 1994. [5] Chivers graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism a year later. [6]
Chivers reported for the Providence Journal on the Providence city government from 1995 to 1999. [7] [8]
From 1999 to 2001 Chivers covered crime and law enforcement in New York City for The New York Times , working out of a three-person bureau co-located inside New York Police Department Headquarters in Lower Manhattan. He was there on the morning of the September 11 attacks, and discreetly reported from Ground Zero for the Times for the next twelve days, parlaying his Marine identity and volunteering in order to remain after most of the press was cleared to facilitate rescue, recovery, and clean-up efforts. Chivers' first publication in Esquire magazine was a September, 2002 retelling of the early days at Ground Zero. [9] [10]
In 2001, Chivers became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He has reported from Afghanistan, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Uganda, Chechnya and Beslan. He served as Moscow correspondent from 2004 through 2007, and was Moscow bureau chief in 2007 and 2008. [10] In Uzbekistan, he covered the Andijan massacre in 2005. Chivers also contributed to The Times' "At War" and "Lens" news blogs. [11] [12] [13]
In 2013 Chivers published an article in The New York Times about the ordeal of photojournalist Matt Schrier as hostage in the hands of Syrian rebels while his cellmate journalist Peter Theo Curtis still was held captive. Chivers disclosed that Curtis had helped Schrier escape, putting Curtis in jeopardy and delivering him to abuse by his kidnappers. [14]
The improvised weapons and munitions of Sunni Islamists were an important focus of his reporting on Libya in 2011 and on Syria in 2012. [15] In 2015 Esquire magazine said Chivers was "the most important war correspondent of his time", saying he developed "a brand of journalism unique in the world for, among other things, its study of the weapons we use to kill one another". [1] [16]
After reporting on a firefight—whether he was in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Ossetia, Libya, or Syria—he'd look for shell casings and ordnance fragments. If he was embedded with American soldiers or Marines, he'd ask them if he could look through what they had found for an hour or so—'finger fucking,' he'd call it—and ask his photographer to take pictures of ammunition stamps and serial numbers. Over time and in this way he would reveal a vast world of small-arms trade and secret trafficking that no other journalist had known existed before. [1]
Chivers is now assigned to The New York Times Magazine and the newspaper's Investigations Desk as a long-form writer and investigative reporter. [17]
In 2010 Chivers published his first book, The Gun on the history of automatic rifles. The scope included the biographies of Hiram Maxim, Richard Gatlin, Paul Mauser, John T. Thompson, their eponymous automatic weapons, and their impact on warfare; the origin of the Soviet AK-47 rifle; and the contest between the AK-47 and the M16 in the Vietnam War, and the spread of the adoption of the AK-47 by criminal, non-military, non-state actors. Reviews were generally favorable; reviewers noted the coverage of both technical aspects and social impacts, that the narrative is a human story, involving inventors, generals, and casualties, and that Chivers' experiences as Marine, journalist, and weapons expert informed the work. [18] [19] [20] [21]
In August 2018 his second book The Fighters about Americans in conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq will be published. [22] An advance review in the Kirkus Reviews May 1, 2018, issue the reviewer notes:
Given his background, Chivers certainly did not set out to write a book emphasizing the foolishness of American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. But that is the story that emerged from his painstaking, courageous reporting, and readers will be thankful for his work. [23]
In 1997 Chivers was granted a Pulitzer International Traveling Fellowship to partially underwrite a series of reports on the collapse of commercial fishing in the North Atlantic entitled "Empty Nets: Atlantic Banks in Peril" for The Providence Journal . In 1997, at age 32, Chivers received the Livingston Award, awarded to a journalist under 35 years of age in the category of Excellence in International Reporting, for the series. The award is sometimes known as the "Pulitzer Prize for the young". [24] [16] [25]
Two of Chivers' stories from Afghanistan were included in The New York Times' submission to the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, which was awarded to the team behind A Nation Challenged, "a special section published regularly after the September 11th terrorist attacks." [26] [27] In 2010 A Nation Challenged was recognized by a committee of judges organized by the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University as one of the Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade 2000-2009. [28]
With Steven Lee Myers, Chivers received a citation for best newspaper reporting from abroad from the Overseas Press Club for coverage of the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis in The Times.[ citation needed ]
Chivers and his editor at Esquire magazine David Granger were recipients of the 2007 Michael Kelly Award and National Magazine Award (Elle Award) For Reporting for "The School", an 18,000-word reconstruction of the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis. The Kelly Award judges said, "Chivers produced an extraordinary hour-by-hour account of the school siege that is impossible to put down. Through careful, persistent reporting, Chivers provided Esquire readers with a haunting look at how innocent hostages, Chechen terrorists, and Russian authorities responded to a crisis that left 362 dead." The American Society of Magazine Editors said, "Chivers recounts, in astonishing and chilling detail, the progress of the three-day siege by Chechen terrorists at School No. 1 in the Russian town of Beslan. Told with economy yet packed with detail, The School presents scenes and images that compel the readers attention, and may haunt them for decades to come." [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] "The School" was optioned for a feature film by Imagine Entertainment. [35] In November 2008, Esquire's editors named "The School" one of the seven greatest stories in the history of the magazine. [36]
Chivers was the 2007 winner of the Jesse Laventhol Prize for Deadline Reporting, awarded by the American Society of Newspaper Editors for his account in The Times of a Navy corpsman's efforts to save a Marine wounded by a sniper in Al Anbar Governorate, Iraq. [37]
As a member of The New York Times team, Chivers shared in the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting which recognized their "masterful, groundbreaking coverage of America's deepening military and political challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan, reporting frequently done under perilous conditions." [4] [38] [39] [40]
Chivers was a finalist for the 2010 American Society of News Editors Batten Medal. [41]
Chivers won the 2011 George Polk Awards in Journalism in the category of Military Reporting presented by Long Island University, citing his "courageous and illuminating coverage of the wars in Libya and Afghanistan" and his "weapons expertise". The Polk Award judges cited Chivers' reports from inside rebel-held Misurata, Libya documenting the use of Spanish-manufactured cluster munitions by forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi on civilian areas, and from Forward Operating Base Sharana in Afghanistan documenting the "frustration of American troops under attack from beyond the Pakistan border". [42] [43] [44] [45]
He won the 2011 Hal Boyle Award, presented by the Overseas Press Club, in recognition of the "best newspaper or news service reporting from abroad," for war reports from Libya and Afghanistan in The New York Times. [46] [47]
On November 29, 2012, Chivers delivered the 32nd Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, an invited talk on the topic of international reporting which honors an American overseas correspondent or commentator on foreign affairs. [12] [13]
In 2012 Chivers was nominated one of "the 100 Outstanding Journalists in the United States in the Last 100 Years" by the faculty of the New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. [48]
In 2013 the staff of the British non-profit Action on Armed Violence named Chivers one of "the most influential writers and broadcasters covering armed violence and conflict around the world". [49]
In 2014, Chivers investigated and reported for The New York Times on the use of chemical weapons and nerve agents against hundreds of American and American-trained Iraqi troops between 2004 and 2011 in Iraq. The Atlantic magazine described Chivers as the Times' "longtime conflict and arms reporter" and as "one of the world’s top conflict reporters" and described the reporting as "the Iraq War's Biggest Untold Story". [4] Chivers won the 2014 best investigative reporting award from the Overseas Press Club for his report "The Secret Casualties of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons" in The Times. [50]
Chivers won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing as an individual. The citation read "For showing, through an artful accumulation of fact and detail, that a Marine’s postwar descent into violence reflected neither the actions of a simple criminal nor a stereotypical case of PTSD (Posttraumatic stress disorder)." His winning article, "The Fighter", in The New York Times Magazine tells the story of "a veteran infantry combat Marine who was struggling with adjusting to life after serving in the war in Afghanistan". [10] [51] [52] [53]
Chivers, his wife, and five children have resided in South Kingstown, Rhode Island since 2008. [1]
This Pulitzer Prize has been awarded since 1942 for a distinguished example of reporting on international affairs, including United Nations correspondence. In its first six years (1942–1947), it was called the Pulitzer Prize for Telegraphic Reporting - International.
Chris Hondros was an American war photographer. Hondros was a finalist twice for a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.
Steve Coll is an American journalist, academic, and executive.
Dexter Price Filkins is an American journalist known primarily for his coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for The New York Times. He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his dispatches from Afghanistan, and won a Pulitzer in 2009 as part of a team of Times reporters for their dispatches from Pakistan and Afghanistan. He has been called "the premier combat journalist of his generation". He currently writes for The New Yorker.
T. Christian Miller is an investigative reporter, editor, author, and war correspondent for ProPublica. He has focused on how multinational corporations operate in foreign countries, documenting human rights and environmental abuses. Miller has covered four wars — Kosovo, Colombia, Israel and the West Bank, and Iraq. He also covered the 2000 presidential campaign. He is also known for his work in the field of computer-assisted reporting and was awarded a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in 2012 to study innovation in journalism. In 2016, Miller was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism with Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project. In 2019, he served as a producer of the Netflix limited series Unbelievable, which was based on the prize-winning article. In 2020, Miller shared the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with other reporters from ProPublica and The Seattle Times. With Megan Rose and Robert Faturechi, Miller co-won the 2020 award for his reporting on United States Seventh Fleet accidents.
Jeffrey A. Gettleman is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Since 2018, he has been the South Asia bureau chief of The New York Times based in New Delhi. From 2006 to July 2017, he was East Africa bureau chief for The New York Times.
Alissa Johannsen Rubin is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist, currently serving as the Baghdad Bureau chief for The New York Times. She has spent much of her career covering the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans.
Bob Drogin is an American journalist and author. He worked for the Los Angeles Times, for nearly four decades. Drogin began his career with the Times as a national correspondent, based in New York, traveling to nearly every state in the United States. He spent eight years as a foreign correspondent, and as bureau chief in Manila and Johannesburg, before returning to the U.S. He covered intelligence and national security in the Washington bureau, from 1998 until retiring in November 2020.
Tyler Portis Hicks is a photojournalist who works as a staff photographer for The New York Times. Based in Kenya, he covers foreign news for the newspaper with an emphasis on conflict and war.
Paul Richard Watson is a Canadian photojournalist, Pulitzer Prize-winner, and author of three books: Where War Lives,Magnum Revolution: 65 Years of Fighting for Freedom, and Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition (2017). The Guardian newspaper named ICE GHOSTS one of the best science books of 2017. The CBC, Canada’s national broadcaster, put Ice Ghosts at the top of its 2017 "Holiday Gift Guide: 12 Books for the Science and Nature Enthusiast on Your List."
Anand Gopal is a writer for The New Yorker magazine and author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes, which describes the travails of three Afghans caught in the war on terror. It was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and the 2014 National Book Award for non-fiction. He has won many major journalism prizes, including the National Magazine Award, for his magazine writing on conflict in the Middle East.
The Best American Magazine Writing 2007 is a non-fiction book published by Columbia University Press, and edited by the American Society of Magazine Editors. It features recognized high-quality journalism pieces from the previous year. The book includes an account by journalist William Langewiesche of Vanity Fair about a controversial United States military operation in Iraq, an investigative journalism article for Rolling Stone by Janet Reitman, a piece published in Esquire by C.J. Chivers about the Beslan school hostage crisis, and an article by Christopher Hitchens about survivors of Agent Orange.
Choe Sang-Hun is a Pulitzer Prize-winning South Korean journalist and Seoul Bureau Chief for The New York Times.
The Michael Kelly Award is a journalism award sponsored by the Atlantic Media Company. It is given for "the fearless pursuit and expression of truth"; the prize is $25,000 for the winner and $3,000 for the runners-up. It is named for Michael Kelly, an American journalist killed covering the Iraq War.
David Bowne Wood is a journalist who has reported on war and conflict around the world for 35 years. He won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, for a series on the American troops severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. A birthright Quaker, Wood registered as a conscientious objector in 1963 and served two years of civilian service before becoming a journalist.
Matthieu Aikins is a Canadian-American journalist and author best known for his reporting on the war in Afghanistan. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, as well as a Puffin Foundation Fellow at the Type Media Center. He has also been a fellow at New America, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy in Berlin.
David Nathaniel Philipps is an American journalist, a national correspondent for The New York Times and author of three non-fiction books. His work has largely focused on the human impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the people who make up the United States military. He has been awarded The Pulitzer Prize twice, most recently in 2022.
Ben Taub is an American journalist who is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He has written for the magazine about a range of subjects related to jihadism, crime, conflict, and human rights, mostly in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.
Charles J. Hanley is an American journalist and author who reported for the Associated Press (AP) for over 40 years, chiefly as a roving international correspondent. In 2000, he and two AP colleagues won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for their work confirming the U.S. military’s massacre of South Korean refugees at No Gun Ri during the Korean War.
C. J. Chivers, widely regarded as a superman of war coverage, covered conflicts for The New York Times and Esquire for 14 years.
He is justly lauded as one of the finest war correspondents of his generation...
{{cite news}}
: |author=
has generic name (help)