IWF is delighted to announce Cokie Roberts as this year’s keynote speaker for our Annual Awards Luncheon:
Date: Monday, September 19, 2016
Time: 11:30 – 1:00
Location: Coralville Marriott Hotel and Convention Center
Roberts is a political commentator for ABC News and NPR. From 1996-2002 she and Sam Donaldson co-anchored the weekly ABC interview program “This Week”. In her more than forty years in broadcasting, she has won countless awards including three Emmys. She has been inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame, and was cited by the American Women in Radio and Television as one of the fifty greatest women in the history of broadcasting. In 2009, the Library of Congress named her a “Living Legend,” one of the very few Americans to have attained that honor.
In addition to her appearances on the airwaves, Roberts, along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, writes a weekly column syndicated in newspapers around the country by U Click. The Robertses are also contributing editors to USA Weekend Magazine, and together they wrote Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith families, published in 2011. Their other book together, From this Day Forward, an account of their now more than forty-five year marriage and other marriages in American history immediately went onto the New York Times bestseller list. It followed Cokie Roberts’s number one bestseller, We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters, an account of women’s roles and relationships throughout American history. Roberts’ histories of women in America’s founding era–Founding Mothers, published in 2004 and Ladies of Liberty in 2008, also became instant bestsellers.
Now, with CAPITAL DAMES: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868 (HarperCollins; April 19, 2016), she zeroes in on the wives, sisters, and female friends of the men leading America into, and through, this unprecedented conflict. Because of the war, these “belles” of Washington society blossomed into suffragists, journalists, social activists, and philanthropists, engaging with the issues of the day on their own terms and, along with the women who worked in and influenced the government, transformed a sleepy, social Southern city into a place of power and action.
With a lifetime of experience in the thick of Washington politics and a deep and abiding interest in the role women have played in American history, Roberts has a singular perspective and is perfectly placed to reassess the importance of women in shaping our country.
We invite you to join us for the annual luncheon to hear keynote speaker Cokie Roberts.
