Soledad O'Brien, co-anchor of CNN's popular American Morning, will speak Monday, April 9 at 7 p.m. in the Nott Memorial as part of the Presidential Forum on Diversity. Her talk, “Diversity: On Television, Behind the Scenes and in our Lives,” is free and open to the public.
O'Brien joined CNN in July 2003 and has since covered major national and international stories. She was the only broadcast journalist permitted to travel with First Lady Laura Bush on her trip to Moscow in fall 2003. The following year, she was among a handful of CNN anchors sent to Puhket, Thailand, to cover the tsunami that claimed more than 155,000 lives.
Before joining CNN, O'Brien had been at NBC News since 1991, where she contributed reports for the Today Show and weekend editions of NBC Nightly News. She was anchor of Weekend Today since July 1999.
In 2003, she covered the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, and she later anchored NBC's weekend coverage of the war in Iraq. In 1998, she covered Pope John Paul II's historic visit to Cuba.
A graduate of Harvard University, O'Brien began her career as an associate producer and news writer at the then-NBC affiliate, WBZ-TV in Boston. She also worked at MSNBC and at KRON in San Francisco.
She won a local Emmy for her work as a co-host on Discovery Channel's The Know Zone. She has been named to numerous “best” lists, including People magazine's “50 Most Beautiful People” (both English and Spanish versions); Crain's Business Reports' and Essence magazine's “40 Under 40”; and Irish American Magazine's “Top 100 Irish Americans.”
She is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She also writes a bi-monthly column for USA Weekend magazine on parenting.