The Forum for the Academy and the Public, the Department of History, the Literary Journalism Program, and the Newkirk Center for Science and Society present “Death Sentences: The Art and Science of Writing about Disease and Disaster”: a public conversation between epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani and Erika Hayasaki (UCI Literary Journalism), moderated by Amy Wilentz (UCI Literary Journalism). This conversation is part of the Newkirk Center’s Communicating Science Series.
Free and open to the public; no reservations required. For more information or for disability accommodations, please contact Patricia Pierson ay (949) 824-6876 or piersonp@uci.edu.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
5-6:30 PM
Humanities Gateway 1010
(first floor, Humanities Gateway building)
Recommended parking location: Mesa Parking Structure. Visit www.parking.uci.edu for maps and directions.
About Elizabeth Pisani:
Elizabeth Pisani has worked as a correspondent (for Reuters, the Economist and the Asia Times) in Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, China, Indochina, Brussels (EU) and Kenya, where she covered everything from stock market meltdowns and cholera epidemics to the arrival of troops in Tiananmen Square. She has run or advised on research studies — mostly related to HIV and conducted among transgender and female sex workers, gay men and drug injectors — in Indonesia, East Timor, China, the Philippines and elsewhere. She’s advised the WHO, UNAIDS, the World Bank and several governments on HIV surveillance and prevention. She’s a visiting Senior Fellow at the Policy Institute at Kings College London, and at KITLV in Leuven. She’s currently working on studies of corruption, health policy diffusion and anti-microbial resistance.
About Erika Hayasaki:
Erika Hayasaki is an assistant professor in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches workshops in narrative nonfiction writing, as well as classes in digital storytelling. She is the author of The Death Class: A True Story About Life (published in 2014 by Simon & Schuster), which has been featured in The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, on NPR, MSNBC, USA Today, and many others. Hayasaki is a contributing health and science writer for The Atlantic and Newsweek, and has been a Los Angeles editor for Narratively, a digital publication devoted to in-depth feature stories. Erika spent nearly a decade as a reporter covering breaking news and writing feature stories for the Los Angeles Times, where she was a staff metro reporter, education writer, and New York-based national correspondent. She has published more than 900 articles for the LA Times and various other publications including The Wall Street Journal, Time, Los Angeles and Glamour magazines, and The Big Roundtable. She has published two Kindle Singles, Dead or Alive (2012), and Drowned by Corn (2014), both Amazon bestsellers.
About Amy Wilentz:
Amy Wilentz is the author of Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti (2013), The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (1989), Martyrs’ Crossing (2000), and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger (2006). She is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, and also was a 1990 nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2014, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography) for Farewell, Fred Voodoo. Wilentz has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, The New Republic, Mother Jones, Harper’s, Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel & Leisure, The San Francisco Chronicle, More, The Village Voice, The London Review of Books and many other publications. She is the former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker and a long-time contributing editor at The Nation. She teaches in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California at Irvine, and lives in Los Angeles.