Joel Simon, author of We Want to Negotiate: The Secret World of Kidnapping, Hostages and Ransom and the former Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, will discuss American hostages around the world and efforts to bring them home. He will be in conversation with Anne Garrels, also an author and the distinguished former Senior Foreign Correspondent for National Public Radio. Both journalists have first hand experience reporting on the ground from conflict zones and share the drive to relay information honestly and clearly, something that is arguably less common these days. Joel’s inspiration for the book they will discuss was the tragic case of journalist James Foley who was kidnapped and publicly murdered by ISIS in Syria in 2014.

Joel Simon is an author, journalist, and press freedom advocate. He is currently a Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute, also at Columbia. He is the author of four books, including The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free, coming on April 26 from Columbia Global Reports. From 2006 until 2021, Joel served as Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. In his drive to defend the rights of journalists, he traveled the world, from Argentina to Zimbabwe. His writing on issues of press freedom has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal, and he is a regular columnist for Columbia Journalism Review. Under his leadership, CPJ was honored with the Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights, a News & Documentary Emmy, and the 2018 Chatham House Prize. His book, The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom, was published in November 2014, and We Want to Negotiate: The Secret World of Kidnapping, Hostages, and Ransom was published in 2018. He began his career reporting on the Guatemalan Civil War, the Mexican environmental crisis, the Zapatista uprising, the peso devaluation, and the assassination of the Mexican Presidential Candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. In 1998, Joel published Endangered Mexico: An Environment on the Edge. It was named one of the 100 best books of the year by the LA Times. He is currently living in Cornwall Hollow.

Anne Garrels was the Senior Foreign Correspondent for NPR for almost 25 years, a post which allowed listeners to hear her voice from all over the world. In addition to living in Baghdad from late 2002 until 2009 to cover the Iraq war, she reported from Mongolia, the Middle East, the former Yugoslavia, China, Russia, former Soviet republics, and numerous other locations. She is the author of Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia (2016) and Naked in Baghdad: The Iraq War and the Aftermath (2004). Before joining NPR in 1986 she was Chief Correspondent in Moscow and Central America for ABC, and the State Department Correspondent for NBC. She has been honored with numerous journalism awards, including the Peabody, the Polk and the Courage in Journalism Award. She has been a Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and served on the board of Oxfam and the Committee to Protect Journalists. She lives in Norfolk.

Registration is required via the Cornwall Library website.