Diana Jean Schemo
Diana Jean Schemo is an author and award-winning veteran national and foreign correspondent, with more than 25 years at The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun. She has covered poverty and child abuse, religion and culture. The Times nominated her coverage of education for a Pulitzer Prize in 2003.
As bureau chief for The Times in Rio de Janeiro from 1995 to 1999, Schemo tracked the drug war in Colombia, and that country’s brutal conflict between leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitaries. Her stories chronicled the rise of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, counterfeiting in Paraguay, indentured servitude in Brazil, and journeys to the heartland of Brazil, where she wrote of previously uncontacted native tribes.Before joining the Times, Schemo became the first woman assigned overseas for The Baltimore Sun, heading the paper’s West European bureau in Paris and, upon the fall of the Berlin Wall, opening a second bureau in Berlin. She covered the trial of Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon,” nuclear arms negotiations, the Kurdish exodus from Iraq following the first Gulf War, and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. She has reported from more than twenty-five countries and regions, from Somalia to Israel, Iraq to the Amazon. She is a three-time winner of New York Times Publisher’s Awards, and other prizes.
Schemo’s work has appeared in Ms., Marie Claire, New York and the New York Times magazines. She is the author of the 2010 book Skies to Conquer: A Year Inside the Air Force Academy (Wiley). The book tracks a year in the life of one squadron at a time of upheaval in the military’s youngest, if most controversial, service academy.
Philip Shenon
Philip Shenon is an investigative reporter and bestselling author, based in Washington D.C. He spent almost all of his career at The New York Times, where he was a reporter from 1981 until 2008. He left the paper a few weeks after his first book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, hit the bestseller lists of both The New York Times and The Washington Post. The book, a behind-the-scenes history of the 9/11 Commission, was hailed by reviewers as “mesmerizing” (The New York Times), “stunning” and “spellbinding” (Publishers Weekly) and a “rich slice of investigative journalism” (The Observer, London). He is also the author of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination, which won the Francis M. Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians.
At The Times, Shenon was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade, reporting from scores of countries across six continents, and held several of the most important reporting assignments in the paper’s Washington bureau, including the State Department, the Pentagon, the Justice Department and Congress. He has reported from several war zones and was one of two reporters from The Times embedded with American ground troops during the invasion of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War. Shenon joined The Times as an assistant to the columnist James Reston, the paper’s former Washington bureau chief and executive editor, a few days after his graduation from Brown University in 1981. He is today a regular contributor to Newsweek magazine and The Daily Beast website on national security and law-enforcement issues. He is also a frequent guest on National Public Radio, CNN, MSNBC and the BBC.
