[All bios as of 3/2000]

Philip Gourevitch has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since April, 1997.  For “After the Genocide,” one of a series of pieces on the Rwandan tragedy, he won a citation from the Overseas Press Club. He was also a finalist for the National Magazine Award in both 1996 and 1997. Mr. Gourevitch’s first book,We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda, was published in September 1998. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the George Polk Award for non-fiction, the Overseas Press Club Book Award, the Helen Bernstein Book Award of the New York Public Library, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for first non-fiction.  Mr. Gourevitch is currently a Contributing Editor at The Forward and a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute. Gourevitch has been published in Harper’s, Granta, The New York Review of Books, Southwest Review, Story, and Zoetrope. He lives in New York City.

Gilles Peress began his photographic career in 1970. He joined Magnum Photos in 1971 and became a full member in 1974. Three times he has served as vice president of Magnum New York and twice as president of the cooperative in 1986/87 and 1989/90. His work has been published in Time, US News and World Report, The New Yorker, Life, Stern, Geo, Paris Match, The New York Times Magazine, and The London Sunday Times. Peress has been the recipient of  fellowships from numerous institutions such as the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography, the Gahan Fellowship at Harvard University and the Open Society Institute’s Projects Fellowships. He has received the Art Director’s Club Award, the Overseas Press Club Award, the Ernst Haas Award for Color Photography, the International Center of Photography Infinity Awards, the Erich Soloman Prize and the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award. Peress’ work has been exhibited in and collected by  the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the International Center of Photography, the Chicago Art Institute, the Cocoran Gallery, the George Eastman House, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Victoria and Albert Museum, Musee d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidu and Museum Folkwang. His recent books include The Graves: Serbenica and Vukovar, Rwanda: The Silence; Farwell to Bosnia; and Telex Iran.

David Rieff is a frequent contributor to various magazines and newspapers. His work has appeared in The New Yorker,  Esquire, Harper’s, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, El Pais, Die Welt and The Independent, Prospect and the TLS in the UK.  He is the author of Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, Going to Miami, Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World, and The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami. He is the co-editor, with Roy Gutman, of War Crimes: What the Public Should Know. He is currently at work on a book on humanitarianism. He lives in New York City.

William Shawcross is an internationally known writer and broadcaster. He is the author of Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, for which he won the George Polk Award for reporting and the Sidney Hillman Foundation Prize, for The Quality of Mercy, The Shah’s Last Ride, and Murdoch. He lives in London, England and is on the board of the International Crisis Group.  Shawcross is a graduate of Oxford University.

Laura Silber is co-author of the critically acclaimed Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, selected for The New York Times 1996 notable book list. She was chief consultant for the award winning documentary series of the same name. Based in former Yugoslavia from 1987, first as a Fulbright Scholar and then as Balkans correspondent for the Financial Times until February 1997, she then served for six months as special advisor to the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia. She relocated to New York and covered the UN for the Financial Times until April 1999. Awarded a fellowship from the Open Society Institute, she is researching a new book. She is now a visiting scholar at the Remarque Institute at NYU and a senior writer for the Financial Times.

Jessica Hagedorn (Moderator)  Born and raised in the Philippines, Jessica Hagedorn is a poet, novelist, performance artist. Screenwriter and playwright. Her novel Dogeaters was nominated for a National Book Award and as been adapted into a play which will be presented at the Public Theater in the 2000-2001 season. Other published works include Danger and Beauty, The Gangster of Love, and  Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology Of Contemporary Asian American Fiction. She has also written the text for Burning Heart: A Portrait of the Philippines, a collaboration with photojournalist Marissa Roth which Rizzoli Books published in 1999. Her essays, nonfiction articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Ms., The Nation, BOMB, the Village Voice, Culturefront, and Harper’s Bazaar, among others. She is presently at work on a new novel.

Jennifer Leaning, (Interlocutor for Audience interactions) M.D., S.M.H., is Professor of International Health at the Harvard School of Public Health; she directs the Program on Humanitarian Crises, based at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, and the Human Security Program at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.  She is an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an attending physician in the Emergency Department of Brigham and Women’s Hospital.  Dr. Leaning teaches disaster management, human rights, and response to humanitarian crises and is editor-in-chief of Medicine and Global Survival, and international quarterly that addresses issues of war, disaster, human rights, and the environment from the perspective of medicine and public health. She has field experience in problems of disaster response and human rights (particularly in the Mideast, former USSR, Somalia, the African Great Lakes area, Albania and Kosovo) and has written widely on these issues. She is a foundng member of Physician s for Human Rights and continues to serve on its Board of Directors. A long time board member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, she is now a member of its Board of Sponsors. Dr. Leaning is also on the Board of Directors for the Humane Society of the United States and the American Red Cross, Massachusetts Bay Chapter.