Daily News

World Affairs Council Dinner to Feature NPR Correspondent

SPRINGFIELD — The World Affairs Council of Western Mass., in cooperation with New England Public Radio and National Public Radio, will present international correspondent Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson on Thursday, Dec. 11 at a dinner event at the Springfield Sheraton Hotel. Nelson will appear in conversation with Dr. William Taubmon on the topic of Ukraine. The deadline for registration is Dec. 8.

The evening will begin at 6 p.m. with a cash-bar reception for regular ticket holders and a private speaker’s reception for premium ticket holders. Dinner and the program will begin at 6:30 p.m. Regular tickets are $50 per person. A limited number of premium tickets are available for $250, which admits two people to the speaker’s reception in addition to the dinner. Premium ticket holders will also be recognized in the evening’s program.

Nelson is based in Berlin and covers Central Europe for National Public Radio. Her reports can be heard on NPR’s award-winning programs, including Morning Edition and All Things Considered. She was previously based in Cairo and covered the Arab World for NPR from the Middle East to North Africa. Nelson returns to Egypt on occasion to cover the tumultuous transition to democracy there.

In 2006, Nelson opened the NPR Kabul Bureau. During the following three and a half years, she gave listeners in an in-depth sense of life inside Afghanistan, from the increase in suicide among women in a country that treats them as second-class citizens to the growing interference of Iran and Pakistan in Afghan affairs.

Nelson spent 20 years as newspaper reporter, including as Knight Ridder’s Middle East bureau chief. While at the Los Angeles Times, she was sent on extended assignment to Iran and Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. She spent three years an editor and reporter for Newsday and was part of the team that won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for covering the crash of TWA Flight 800.

Taubman is Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College, and is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “Khrushchev: The Man and His Era.”