Helene Cooper

“This country took me and my family in when we were at one of the lowest points of our lives and returned to me a feeling I had lost: that of being safe,” Helene Cooper, a Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times, wrote in a 2017 Op-ed. “I was so proud when I eventually took the oath of citizenship and posed for photos, waving an American flag, in front of the courthouse where I was sworn in.” Following a military coup in Liberia, Cooper and her family fled to the United States when she was 13. She describes the trauma around these events in her acclaimed memoir, The House on Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood (2008). Cooper is part of the team that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for coverage of the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. She is also the recipient of the George Polk award for health reporting and the Overseas Press Club Award. Her latest book, Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson (2017), is a biography of Liberia’s first democratically elected female president. Updated 2018