Gettleman

Jeffrey Gettleman '94, the East Africa bureau chief for The New York Times, won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting April 16. His citation for the $10,000 award reads: "Awarded to Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times for his vivid reports, often at personal peril, on famine and conflict in East Africa, a neglected but increasingly strategic part of the world."

Gettleman covers 12 countries for the Times. His work has focused on internal conflicts in Kenya, Congo, Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia. He previously worked for the Times in New Jersey, Baghdad and Atlanta. Gettleman has also been a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and the St. Petersburg Times.

Gettleman studied philosophy at Cornell and earned a master's of philosophy degree from Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

"We in philosophy are thrilled with the news of Jeffrey Gettleman's Pulitzer Prize and proud to have been part of his formative experience at Cornell," said Scott MacDonald, the Stanford H. Taylor '50 Chair of the Sage School of Philosophy. "On a recent visit to campus he spoke eloquently to students about the value of the analytical thinking and writing skills he honed as a philosophy major. It's always rewarding to see our former students making extraordinary contributions to the world beyond Cornell."

In April 2011, Gettleman spoke on campus about being kidnapped, along with his wife, Courtenay Morris '94, a Times Web producer, while reporting on Somali rebels in Ethiopia. The couple, who today live in Nairobi with their two sons, were released after a week in an Ethiopian prison along with another colleague.

Speaking about choosing to write stories that can effect positive change while remaining an impartial journalist, Gettleman told his Cornell audience: "I don't know if I've figured it out yet, because I do get discouraged. There is some post-traumatic stress that I deal with. But I have an outlet. I don't have to bottle it all up. I can write about it in a big way."

He and a photographer had been held hostage for several hours during the 2003 invasion of Iraq by armed gunmen near Fallujah.

Gettleman has appeared as a news commentator on CNN, BBC, PBS, NPR, ABC and the Charlie Rose show. He has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic and GQ.