Andrea Elliott, recipient of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for journalism, offers her perspective on Muslims in America.

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.

The video clips below feature Hansen introducing the 2010 honorands followed by comments by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout ’77; television journalist Jane Pauley; climate researcher James J. McCarthy; dancer-choreographer Rennie Harris, a recent Guggenheim Fellow; and fertility and oncology researcher Teresa Woodruff.

President Hansen introduces the honorands

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Elizabeth Strout ’77

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Jane Pauley

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James J. McCarthy

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Rennie Harris

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Teresa K. Woodruff

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Justice, a professor of English at the University of Florida, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his collection, Selected Poems. He later won the prestigious Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement. In addition to his poetry, Justice has written essays, fiction and a libretto, and has edited four poetry collections.

“His brilliance is never at the service merely of flash and display,” wrote critic Anthony Hecht. “It is always subservient to experienced truth, to accuracy, to justice, the ancient virtue as well as the personal signature. He is one of our finest poets.”

Justice currently is a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His visit to Bates is sponsored by the college’s English department.