Keynote Speaker

Charlayne Hunter-Gault is an award-winning journalist with more than 40 years in the industry. She is the author of In My Place, a memoir of the civil rights movement, fashioned around her experiences as the first black woman to attend the University of Georgia and her latest book, New News Out of Africa: Uncovering the African Renaissance.

As a global journalist, Hunter-Gault has returned to NPR as a Special Correspondent after spending six years as CNN's Johannesburg Bureau Chief and Correspondent. Before that, she worked as NPR’s chief correspondent in Africa.

Hunter-Gault had joined NPR in 1997 after 20 years with PBS, where she worked as a national correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. She began her journalism career as a reporter for The New Yorker, before working as a local news anchor for WRC-TV in Washington, D.C. and as the Harlem bureau chief for The New York Times.

Her numerous honors include two Emmy awards and two Peabody awards—one for her work on Apartheid's People, a NewsHour series about South African life during apartheid and the other for general coverage of Africa in 1998. Hunter-Gault also was the recipient of the 1986 Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists, the 1990 Sidney Hillman Award, the American Women in Radio and Television award, the Good Housekeeping Broadcast Personality of the Year Award and a 2004 National Association of Black Journalists Award for her CNN series on Zimbabwe. She has also received awards from Amnesty International for her Human Rights reporting, especially her PBS Series, Rights and Wrongs, a human rights television magazine. In August, 2005, she was inducted in the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. She is a sought after public speaker, holds more than two dozen honorary degrees, is on the board of The Committee to Protect Journalists and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.