News & Events
The Minnesota Public Radio Broadcast Journalist Series commissions journalists and correspondents who share their insights on their craft as well as on people and events that affect them professionally. Each guest is paired with an MPR host who interviews the guest on stage. Tickets for these public events are free and can be reserved by using a sign-up page on MPRNews.org.
Alix Spiegel
7 p.m. April 29, 2013, in OEC Auditorium
Alix Spiegel (pronounced ah-LEES) came from This America Life, and does incredible stories on different brain phenomena, mental health, etc. Lots of drive-way moments from her.
NPR correspondent Alix Spiegel works on the Science desk and covers psychology.
Arriving at NPR in 2003, much of Spiegel's reporting has been on emotion mental health. She has reported on everything from the psychological impact of killing another person, to the emotional devastation of Katrina, to psycho-therapeutic approaches to transgender children.
Over the course of her career in public radio, Spiegel has won awards including the George Foster Peabody Award, Livingston Award, and Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. Spiegel's 2007 documentary revealing mental health issues and crime plaguing a Southern Mississippi FEMA trailer park housing Katrina victims was recognized with Scripps Howard National Journalism Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. Her radio documentary 81 Words, about the removal of homosexuality from psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, is being turned into a film by HBO.
Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Spiegel graduated from Oberlin College. She began her career in radio in 1995 as one of the founding producers of the public radio show This American Life. Spiegel left the show in 1999 to become a full time reporter. She has also written forThe New Yorker magazine and The New York Times.
David Plotz
7 p.m., May 15, 2013, in OEC Auditorium
David Plotz is editor of Slate. Before joining the magazine in 1996, Plotz was a senior editor and staff writer for the Washington City Paper. Plotz has written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Rolling Stone, GQ, the New Republic, and the Washington Post, among other publications.
He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank and, most recently, Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible, based on his "Blogging the Bible" series for Slate.
