Pulitzer-winning journalist to discuss Muslim American experience since 9/11

Andrea Elliott, a New York Times reporter who has reported on Muslims in America since 2005, offers her perspective on the topic at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 28, in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St.

Presented by the Office of Intercultural Education, the event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-755-5980.

Elliott has been an investigative reporter for The New York Times since 2003. In 2005, she began covering Islam in America. Her series “An Imam in America,” which won Elliott the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, chronicled the life of Sheik Reda Shata, an immigrant Muslim leader in Brooklyn.

Reda came to relieve the previous imam, who was exhausted by the discrimination his congregants faced daily. Elliott poignantly chronicled Reda’s setbacks and successes in a manner that asked her readers to reconsider their conceptions of Islam.

Elliott has also published articles on Muslims in the American military, an examination of the prison scandal at Abu Ghraib and a special report investigating the lives of Moroccan suicide bombers. In 2009 she examined what had motivated 20 Somali-Americans to join the jihad in Somalia.

Along with the Pulitzer Prize, Elliot has received awards from the Overseas Press Club, the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the New York Press Club. Her work was featured in the compilation Best Newspaper Writing 2007-2008 (CQ Press). In 2008, she was a finalist for the National Magazine Award.

Before joining the Times, Elliott was a reporter at The Miami Herald. She earned a B.A. degree in comparative literature from Occidental College in 1996, and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1999, graduating first in her class.