Career
She was a member of The New York Times reporting team that received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for coverage of the 2014 Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa. [2] Cooper wrote about Liberian families in a culture of hugging and physical contact, when physical contact could suddenly spread a deadly disease. Liberians who cared for dying family members, as many did, knew they would probably get infected themselves. [3] Other team members were Pam Belluck, Sheri Fink, Adam Nossiter, Norimitsu Onishi, Kevin Sack, and Ben C. Solomon. [4]
At The Wall Street Journal , Cooper wrote about trade, politics, race, and foreign policy at the Washington and Atlanta bureaus from 1992 to 1997. From 1997 to 1999, she reported on the European Monetary Union from the London bureau. From 1999 to 2002, she was a reporter focusing on international economics; then assistant Washington bureau chief from 2002 to 2004.
In 2000, she and colleague Bob Davis won the Raymond Clapper Memorial Award for their Washington reporting. [5]
In 2008, she published a memoir, The House at Sugar Beach (Simon & Schuster), about the Liberian coup of 1980 and its effect on the Coopers, who were socially and politically elite descendants of the free people of color from the United States who colonized Liberia in the 19th century. The book received critical acclaim [6] and was a National Books Critics Circle Award finalist in 2008 for autobiography. [7] The Washington Post called the book "a brilliant spotlight on a land too long forgotten". [8]
She is the author of the book Madame President, about Liberia's first female president.
Personal life
Cooper was born in Monrovia, Liberia, and studied journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating with a B.A. in 1987. [1] [9] Her ancestors include two early settlers of Liberia, Elijah Johnson [1] and Randolph Cooper. Her paternal grandfather was John Lewis Cooper, a Liberian telecommunications businessman and government minister.
In a piece about her reaction to the Trump Administration's freeze on Muslim refugees, Cooper recounted her own experience as a 13-year-old refugee leaving Liberia. Her father was shot (but survived), her cousin was executed, and her mother agreed to be gang-raped by soldiers to protect her and her sisters. They came to the U.S. on a tourist visa, which they overstayed until Ronald Reagan's amnesty gave them green cards. When she read an account of an Iranian family being taken off a plane, she remembered how her family was waiting for the takeoff in Liberia, praying that no one would take them off. [10]
Helene Cooper is first cousins with Wilmot Collins, the current mayor of Helena, Montana. He is known for being the first black person to be elected as mayor of a Montanan town or city (after its statehood in November 1889). [11] [12]
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.
Frances FitzGerald is an American journalist and historian, who is primarily known for Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972), an account of the Vietnam War. It was a bestseller that won the Pulitzer Prize, Bancroft Prize, and National Book Award.
Susan Lea Page is an American journalist, political commentator, and biographer, and the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for USA Today.
Norimitsu Onishi is a Japanese Canadian journalist. He is a Paris correspondent for the New York Times, after holding the position as Bureau Chief in Johannesburg, Jakarta, Tokyo and Abidjan.
Stacy Madeleine Schiff is an American former editor, essayist, and author of five biographies. Her biography of Véra Nabokova won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Schiff has also written biographies of French aviator and author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, colonial American-era polymath and prime mover of America's founding, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin's fellow Founding Father Samuel Adams, ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and the important figures and events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–93 in colonial Massachusetts.
Charles Cecil Dennis Jr was a Liberian political figure who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs under President William Tolbert from 1973 until the 1980 Liberian coup d'état led by Samuel Doe. Along with 11 other current and former members of the Liberian government, he was tried by a military tribunal and executed by firing squad ten days after the coup.
Anne Elise Kornblut is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist who is currently serving as Vice President of Global Curation at Facebook. Kornblut has previously served as the deputy national editor of The Washington Post, overseeing national politics, national security and health/science/environmental coverage.
Teresa Carpenter is an American author. Her awards include the Pulitzer Prize for best feature writing.
Francine du Plessix Gray was a French-American Pulitzer Prize–nominated writer and literary critic.
Mark Mazzetti is an American journalist who works for the New York Times. He is currently a Washington Investigative Correspondent for the Times.
Sheri Fink is an American journalist who writes about health, medicine and science.
Daniel Berehulak is an Australian photographer and photojournalist based in Mexico City. He is a staff photographer of The New York Times and has visited more than 60 countries covering contemporary issues.
Kate Zernike is an American journalist who is national correspondent for The New York Times, where she has been since April 2000, covering education, criminal justice, Congress, and national elections, and where she covered Hurricane Katrina. She was previously a reporter at The Boston Globe (1995–2000), where she was responsible for covering education and special projects. She is the author of Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America (2010), on the Tea Party movement. Marjorie Kehe of The Christian Science Monitor remarked in 2010 that it was likely that "no other journalist in the United States has devoted as much time to covering the tea party movement".
Kevin Sack, an American journalist, is a senior reporter for The New York Times.
Ben C. Solomon is an American filmmaker and journalist. He is currently an international correspondent for VICE News. He was the inaugural filmmaker-in-residence at Frontline after spending nine years as a foreign correspondent and video journalist for The New York Times. In 2015, Solomon won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of Times reporters working in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea during the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa. He has reported from over 60 countries including numerous war zones, including Syria, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine.
Dana Canedy is an American journalist, author, and publishing executive who worked at the New York Times for over 20 years, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. She was appointed senior vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster's flagship eponymous imprint in July 2020. She is the first African-American to head a "major publishing imprint".
Wilmot Collins is an American politician serving as the mayor of Helena, Montana. He defeated four-term incumbent mayor James E. Smith in the 2017 mayoral election on November 7, 2017, with 51% of the vote. This victory made him the first black person to be elected the mayor of any city in the history of Montana since statehood was achieved in 1889.
Michael D. Shear is an American journalist who is a White House correspondent for The New York Times. He previously worked at The Washington Post, where he was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007. He regularly appears on CNN and MSNBC.
Etweda Ambavi Gbenyon Cooper, known as Sugars, is a Liberian politician and peace activist. She has been described as "the doyenne" and "the godmother" of the Liberian women's movement.
