Samantha Power
“The Age of Genocide”
Human rights scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Samantha Power is the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer for general non-fiction, the 2003 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for general non-fiction, and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Prize for the best book on U.S. foreign policy.
Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where she served from 1998–2002. Between 1993–96, she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, and The Economist. “The fact that you could see those men, in real-time, looking just like those black and white pictures we had all seen from the Holocaust, made a profound difference on whether people were prone to call their congressman. Congress, in turn, made a profound difference on the executive branch to respond,” she says. Continuing her efforts to document genocide, she traveled to Darfur, Sudan, to chronicle the horrors in an article for the New Yorker. It won a 2005 National Magazine Award for best reporting.
Power is engaged with public policy on several levels. She spent 2005–06 working in the office of U.S. Senator and current presidential hopeful Barack Obama.
She is currently writing a political biography on former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Vieira de Mello. He was killed in the 2003 bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq. Power’s says this new work is “ultimately a book about what’s right and wrong with the U.N.,” which she calls an “institution on the brink.”