Shipler, a 1964 graduate of Dartmouth College, has done just about everything in his career. After serving two years as an officer in the United States Navy, he entered the journalism field, initially covering housing, poverty and politics for The New York Times. Early in his career, Shipler won awards from the American Political Science Association and the New York Newspaper Guild.
Shipler reported from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Burma from 1973-75, spent four years reporting from Moscow and served as bureau chief for five years in Jerusalem. He received the 1983 George Polk Award for coverage of the Lebanon War. After spending a year as a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., Shipler served as chief diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times in Washington, D.C. until 1988. He moved on to become a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1988-90, writing on transitions to democracy in Russia and Eastern Europe for The New Yorker and other publications.
Shipler is the author of several successful literary works, including "A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America," (1997), "Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams" (1983) and "Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land" (1987). The latter won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Shipler later served as executive producer, writer and narrator of a PBS documentary on "Arab and Jew," which won a 1990 DuPont-Columbia award for broadcast journalism.
Shipler holds honorary degrees from Middlebury College and Glassboro State College and has taught at Princeton University and American University. He also was one of three authors invited by former president Bill Clinton to participate in a town meeting on race relations in 1997.
