Inside Duke Medicine

Provost’s Lecture Series: Natural Disasters, Human Responses

Monday, April 11, 2011
5:00-6:30 p.m.
Social Sciences Building, Room 139

Interpreting Disaster

Damien Cave
The New York Times
Correspondent, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean

Three years after covering Iraq at the height of its sectarian war, Damien Cave found himself amidst the countless dead of Haiti’s disastrous earthquake. He will discuss how reporters tackle the challenges of traumatic stories – how they get to where they need to be, how they choose which stories to tell, and how they are impacted by what they experience.

Damien Cave is a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, based in Mexico City. Along with two other reporters, he covers Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

From 2008 to 2010 he served as the Times’ Miami bureau chief. In addition to covering the earthquake in Haiti, his coverage of Florida ranged widely from recession, politics, and veterans to out-of-control bunnies.

His previous assignment was in Baghdad. There, he wrote extensively about the American troop surge and the consequences of violence; and he was among a team of Times reporters who were finalists for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. He also led a smaller group that won the 2008 Overseas Press Club award for best international coverage on the Web.

Prior to Iraq, he covered New York's City Hall and Newark, N.J., where he founded the paper's first political blog, Newark ’06, to cover Cory Booker's successful run for mayor. His music, arts and culture coverage has appeared in other sections of the Times, and before joining the paper in 2004, Damien worked as a staff writer and editor at Rolling Stone magazine and at Salon.com – though he started his journalism career in Bolivia as a freelancer.

Born in Oregon and raised in Worcester, Mass., he has a B.A. from Boston College and an M.S. from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He is married to Diana Oliva Cave, a video and multimedia journalist who was also a part of The Times's Baghdad bureau, and with whom he often works wherever the news takes them.

You can follow Damien on Twitter @damiencave.

Provost’s Lecture Series: Natural Disasters, Human Responses
http://www.provost.duke.edu/speaker_series/index.html