Sheri Fink, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, to discuss her book "Five Days at Memorial" on April 15, 2016

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Sheri Fink, author of "Five Days at Memorial" (2013) Photo credit: Jen Dessinger

ALBANY, NY (03/31/2016)(readMedia)-- Sheri Fink, award-winning journalist and New York Times correspondent, will deliver the keynote address at the University at Albany's Disasters, Ethics, and Social Justice Conference, on Friday, April 15, 2016 at 12:30 p.m. in the Campus Center Ballroom on the University at Albany's uptown campus. The address will be followed by a reception. Free and open to the public, the events are sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute, and UAlbany's College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity.

Sheri Fink is one of America's most acclaimed journalists and nonfiction authors. A correspondent for the New York Times, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and the New America Foundation, Fink has won Pulitzer Prizes in both Investigative Reporting and International Reporting for her journalistic work. In addition, Fink received the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction for her book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital.

In August 2009, Fink published "The Deadly Choices at Memorial" in the New York Times Magazine. The article, which distilled over two years of reporting, described the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans. In April 2010, Fink was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, and the article went on to win a 2010 National Magazine Award for Reporting and the 2010 Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Her book Five Days at Memorial (2013) expanded on her 2009 article; in addition to the National Book Critics Circle Award, it received a 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the 2014 Ridenhour Book Prize, and the 2015 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Sherwin Nuland declared: "What we have here is masterly reporting and the glow of fine writing." In Bookforum, Jeff Sharlet proclaimed: "Fink, under the guise of third-person journalistic objectivity, drives us towards a kind of uncertainty so great that it's revelatory. This isn't just a policy brief ornamented with characters. It is, like all great journalism, a document unto itself, an artifact of what we thought about 'life and death' issues in the early twenty-first century."

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Sheri Fink graduated from the University of Michigan in 1990 with a degree in psychology, and received a Ph.D. in neuroscience in 1998 and an M.D. in 1999 from Stanford University. After graduating from medical school, Fink became involved in humanitarian aid work in a variety of disaster and war zones, including Kosovo, Bosnia, and Macedonia. Her first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Surviving (2004), explored the struggles of several young doctors in Snebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, during the early 1990s. It received an American Medical Writers Association book award as well as a Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club, and was a finalist for the PEN-Martha Albrand Award.

Sheri Fink's keynote address is part of the Disasters, Ethics, and Social Justice Conference sponsored by UAlbany's College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity, to be held at the University at Albany on April 15, 2016. Information on the College can be found here: http://www.albany.edu/cehc/

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.

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