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The National Institute for Civil Discourse was honored that Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton served as the first Honorary Co-Chairs of the Institute.

Born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, Tom Daschle graduated from South Dakota State University in 1969. Upon graduation, he entered the United States Air Force where he served as an intelligence officer in the Strategic Air Command until mid-1972.

Following completion of his military service, Senator Daschle served on the staff of Senator James Abourezk. In 1978, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives where he served for eight years. In 1986, he was elected to the U.S. Senate and eight years later became its Democratic Leader. Senator Daschle is one of the longest serving Senate Democratic Leaders in history and the only one to serve twice as both Majority and Minority Leader. During his tenure, Senator Daschle navigated the Senate through some of its most historic economic and national security challenges. In 2003, he chronicled some of these experiences in his book, Like No Other Time: The 107th Congress and the Two Years That Changed America Forever.

Today, Senator Daschle is a Senior Policy Advisor to the law firm of DLA Piper where he provides clients with strategic advice on public policy issues such as climate change, energy, health care, trade, financial services and telecommunications. Since leaving the Senate, he has distinguished his expertise in health care through the publication of Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis and the recently published, GETTING IT DONE: How Obama and Congress Finally Broke the Stalemate to Make Way for Health Care Reform. Daschle has continued to lead on climate change and renewable energy, as well as a variety of other public policy challenges.

In 2007, he joined with former Majority Leaders George Mitchell, Bob Dole, and Howard Baker to create the Bipartisan Policy Center, an organization dedicated to finding common ground on some of the pressing public policy challenges of our time. Senator Daschle serves on the board of the Center for American Progress, acts as the Vice Chair of the National Democratic Institute, and is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations.

He also is a member of the Health Policy and Management Executive Council at the Harvard School of Public Health in addition to the Global Policy Advisory Council for the Health Worker Migration Initiative. He is a member of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation Board of Trustees, the GE Healthymagination Advisory Board; the National Integrated Foodsystem Advisory Board; and the Committee on Collaborative Initiatives at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In addition, Senator Daschle’s board memberships include the Blum Foundation; the Energy Future Coalition, the Committee to Modernize Voter Registration; the US Global Leadership Coalition Advisory Council and the Advisory Committee on the Trust for National Mall.

Christine Todd Whitman is the President of The Whitman Strategy Group (WSG), a consulting firm that specializes in energy and environmental issues. WSG offers a comprehensive set of solutions to problems facing businesses, organizations, and governments; they have been at the forefront of helping leading companies find innovative solutions to environmental challenges.

Governor Whitman served in the cabinet of President George W. Bush as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from January of 2001 until June of 2003. She was the 50th Governor of the State of New Jersey, serving as its first woman governor from 1994 until 2001.

As Governor, Christie Whitman earned praise from both Republicans and Democrats for her commitment to preserve a record amount of New Jersey land as permanent green space. She was also recognized by the Natural Resources Defense Council as having instituted the most comprehensive beach monitoring system in the nation. As EPA Administrator, she promoted common-sense environmental improvements such as watershed-based water protection policies. She championed regulations requiring non-road diesel engines to reduce sulfur emissions by more than 95 percent. During her tenure, the Agency was successful in passing and implementing landmark brownfields legislation to promote the redevelopment and reuse of “brownfields”, previously contaminated industrial sites.

She is the author of a New York Times best seller called “It’s My Party Too”, which was published in January of 2005 and released in paperback in March 2006.

Governor Whitman serves on the Board of Directors of Texas Instruments Inc. and United Technologies Corporation, and formerly served on the Board of S.C. Johnson and Son, Inc. She is a member of the Nuclear Matters Advisory Council and Terrestrial Energy’s International Advisory Board. She holds an Executive Masters Professional Director Certification from the American College of Corporate Directors.

Governor Whitman also serves a number of non-profit organizations including as Chairman of the American Security Project and Vice-Chairman of the Trustees of the Eisenhower Fellowships. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Responsible Shale Development. She co-chairs the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative Leadership Council and is on the Advisory Boards of the Corporate Eco Forum and The Northeast Maglev (TNEM). She serves as an advisor to the Aspen Rodel Fellowship program and on the O’Connor Judicial Selection Advisory Committee at the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System. She is a member of the Senior Advisory Committee of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University and a member of the National Advisory Committees for the Women’s Coalition for Common Sense and the Presidential Climate Action Project.

Prior to becoming Governor, she was the President of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities and served on the Somerset County board of Chosen Freeholders.

Governor Whitman holds a BA from Wheaton College in Norton, MA, and was married for 41 years to the late John R. Whitman. She has two children and seven grandchildren.

Kevin Beckford is the co-founder of The Hustlers Guild, a nonprofit that uses hip hop to expand access and opportunity to Black and Latinx youth in the innovation space. He also serves as the advancement manager for Urban Assembly where he supports policy and external outreach for the public school network.

A first-generation college graduate whose experiences living under the poverty line in urban America has had a personal impact, Kevin is committed to dismantling white supremacy in education and workforce development. With the Hustlers Guild, over 1,500 students in the Washington, D.C. area have been exposed to coding and workforce enrichment opportunities at organizations such as Facebook, Google, Sony Music, and Roc Nation.

From 2014-2016, Kevin worked as the domestic policy portfolio lead in the White House Presidential Correspondence Office and as a special advisor to Secretary Julian Castro at the U. S. Department of Housing and Development. While working for the White House, Kevin successfully advocated for more inclusive and responsive communication practices concerning race relations and police brutality.

Prior to serving as a political appointee under the Obama administration, Kevin taught African American history to high school students in Philadelphia. Kevin earned his B.A. in African American Studies and Political Science from Yale University, his MPhil. in African Studies from the University of Cambridge, and his MSc. in Education from the University of Pennsylvania.

“Donna Brazile is hard to ignore, given her penchant for candor and 20 years’ experience in the making of Democratic presidential candidates. She feels that getting a candidate elected takes the same artful mix as cooking up a fine gumbo. And her political opinions are as fiery as Tabasco.” –The New York Times

Veteran Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile is an adjunct professor, author, syndicated columnist, television political commentator, Vice Chair of Voter Registration and Participation at the Democratic National Committee, and former chair of the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute. Last, but never least, she is a native of New Orleans.

Aside from working for the full recovery of her beloved New Orleans, Ms. Brazile’s passion is encouraging young people to vote, to work within the system to strengthen it, and to run for public office.

A New Orleans native, Ms. Brazile began her political career at the age of nine when she worked to elect a City Council candidate who had promised to build a playground in her neighborhood; the candidate won, the swing sets was installed, and a lifelong passion for political progress was ignited. Four decades and innumerable state and local campaigns later, Ms. Brazile has worked on every presidential campaign from 1976 through 2000, when she served as campaign manager for former Vice President Al Gore, becoming the first African-American woman to manage a presidential campaign.

Author of the best-selling memoir Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics, Ms. Brazile is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, a syndicated newspaper columnist for United Media, a columnist for Ms. Magazine and O Magazine, and an on-air contributor to CNN, NPR, and ABC, where she regularly appears on This Week.

In August 2009, O, The Oprah Magazine chose Ms. Brazile as one of its 20 “remarkable visionaries” for the magazine’s first-ever O Power List. In addition, she was named among the 100 Most Powerful Women by Washingtonian magazine, Top 50 Women in America by Essence magazine, and received the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s highest award for political achievement. A former member of the board of directors of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, responsible for leading the state’s rebuilding process in the aftermath of two catastrophic hurricanes, Ms. Brazile is the proud recipient of honorary doctorate degrees from Louisiana State University and Xavier University of Louisiana, the only historically Black, Catholic institution of higher education in the United States.

Ms. Brazile is founder and managing director of Brazile & Associates LLC, a general consulting, grassroots advocacy, and training firm based in Washington, DC.

Sylvia M. Burwell is American University's 15th president and the first woman to serve as president. Burwell has held two cabinet positions in the United States government. She served as the 22nd secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services from 2014 to 2017. During her tenure, she managed a trillion-dollar department that includes the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, and the Medicaid and Medicare programs; oversaw the successful implementation of the Affordable Care Act; and led the department’s responses to the Ebola and Zika outbreaks. Before that, she served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, working with Congress to negotiate a two-year budget deal following the 2013 government shutdown. In both roles she was known as a leader who worked successfully across the aisle and focused on delivering results for the American people.

Her additional government experience is extensive and includes roles as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, deputy chief of staff to the president, chief of staff to the secretary of the Treasury, and special assistant to the director of the National Economic Council.

Burwell has held leadership positions at two of the largest foundations in the world. She served 11 years at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, including roles as the chief operating officer and president of the Global Development Program. She then served as president of the Walmart Foundation and ran its global Women’s Economic Empowerment efforts. Her private sector experience includes service on the Board of Directors of MetLife.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in Government from Harvard University and a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

A second-generation Greek American, Burwell is a native of Hinton, West Virginia. She and her husband Stephen Burwell are the parents of two young children.

Katie Couric is an award-winning journalist, author of the best-selling book The Best Advice I Ever Got: Lessons From Extraordinary Lives, and popular TV personality. She also writes a monthly column for Glamour magazine, which features an interview with a dynamic female role model every month, and is active on Twitter, @katiecouric. Couric served as anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, a 60 Minutes correspondent and anchor of CBS News primetime specials for the past 5 years.

During the last four and a half years, Couric has reported on and anchored newscasts and broadcasts for some of the biggest domestic and international stories and has conducted numerous exclusive newsmaker interviews including the historic 2008 Presidential election. Couric has been honored with many awards including the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Newscast in both 2008 and 2009, Walter Cronkite Award for Special Achievement for “National Impact on the 2008 Campaign,” the Al Neuharth Award for Excellence in the Media, and the Alfred I. duPont Award for political reporting for her 2008 interviews with Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Couric also conducted two special series of in-depth and incisive interviews during the Presidential campaign for the CBS Evening News series “Primary Questions” and “Presidential Questions.”

Couric has developed several online content initiatives including her notebook and YouTube channel, among others. Couric is also a co-founder of Stand Up To Cancer, and in March 2000, Couric launched the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance with the Entertainment Industry Foundation and Lilly Tartikoff to fund cutting-edge research in colorectal cancer and generate awareness about the life-saving value of screening.

Couric graduated with honors from the University of Virginia in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in English and a focus on American studies.

Former Congressman Artur Davis represented Alabama's 7th District from 2003 to 2010. As a member of the Ways and Means, Judiciary, and Financial Services Committees, Davis built a record of bipartisan accomplishment that led to Esquire Magazine recognizing him as one of the 10 Best Members of Congress in 2008. After an unsuccessful run for Governor of Alabama in 2010, Davis returned to the legal and public policy arena. He has consulted with national organizations advocating in state legislatures, run the state of Alabama's legal services program, and currently represents victims of employment discrimination in federal court.

Gabrielle Giffords represented Arizona’s 8 Congressional district form 2007 - 2012. She is the third woman in Arizona’s history to be elected the US Congress and the youngest woman elected to the Arizona State Senate. As a Member of the House, she participated in the Blue Dog Democrat Coalition and the New Democrat Coalition. Giffords won in 2006 against Republican Randy Graf. In 2008, she won reelection against Republican Tim Bee, a childhood classmate and former colleague from the Arizona State Senate. In 2010, she once again won reelection against Republican and Tea Party candidate Jesse Kelly.

While in Congress, Giffords voted in favor of raising the minimum wage, endorsing the 9/11 commission recommendations, new rules for the House of Representative targeting ethical issues, the repeal of $14 billion of subsidies to big oil reserves and for subsidies for renewable energy. She has also worked tirelessly for border control and veteran affairs.

Prior to her time as a Congresswoman, she was a member of the Arizona House of Representatives from 2001-2003 and the Arizona Senate from 2003-2005. Aside from her political work, Giffords worked as an associate for regional economic development at Price Waterhouse in New York City and as CEO of El Campo Tire Warehouses, a local automotive chain owned by her father.

Giffords is a native Tucsonan. She graduated with a Bachelor’s of Arts in Sociology and Latin American History from Scripps College in 1993. Giffords then spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar in Chihuahua, Mexico. She also graduated with a Master’s degree in Regional Planning from Cornell University in 1996. She is married to US Navy Captain and NASA astronaut Mark Kelly.

Giffords was a victim of the January 8 shooting in Tucson, Arizona. She has made great progress in recovering with the help from friends, family and supporters. She resigned from the US Congress on January 25, 2012 to focus on further recovery.

Dan Glickman is the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute Congressional Program, a nongovernmental, nonpartisan educational program for members of the United States Congress. The program provides lawmakers with a stronger grasp of critical public policy issues by convening high-level conferences and breakfast meetings in which legislators are brought together with internationally-recognized academics, experts and leaders to study the issues and explore various policy alternatives.

He served as the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture from March 1995 until January 2001. Under his leadership, the Department administered farm and conservation programs; modernized food safety regulations; forged international trade agreements to expand U.S. markets; and improved its commitment to fairness and equality in civil rights.
Before his appointment as Secretary of Agriculture, Glickman served for 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives representing the 4th Congressional District of Kansas. During that time, he was a member of the House Agriculture Committee, including six years as chairman of the subcommittee with jurisdiction over federal farm policy issues. Moreover, he was an active member of the House Judiciary Committee; chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; and was a leading congressional expert on general aviation policy.

Glickman is also a Senior Fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. The BPC was formed in 2007 by former Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, Bob Dole and George Mitchell to develop and promote bipartisan solutions to the country’s problems and to promote civility in government.

Glickman served as Chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) from 2004 until 2010.

Prior to joining the MPAA, he was the Director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (2002-2004).

Before his election to Congress in 1976, Glickman served as president of the Wichita School Board; was a partner in the law firm of Sargent, Klenda and Glickman; and worked as a trial attorney at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He received his Bachelor of Arts in history from the University of Michigan and his J.D. from The George Washington University. He is a member of the Kansas and District of Columbia Bars.

Glickman is also on the board of directors of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange; Communities in Schools; Food Research and Action Center, a domestic anti-hunger organization; National 4-H Council; and the Center for U.S. Global Engagement, where he is Chair of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition. He co-chairs an initiative of eight foundations, administered by the Meridian Institute, to look at long-term implications of food and agricultural policy. He chairs an initiative at the Institute of Medicine on accelerating progress on childhood obesity. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a senior fellow of the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, the Council on American Politics at The Graduate School of Political Management at The George Washington University, and is Vice-Chair of the World Food Program-USA. He is the co-chair of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs' global agricultural development initiative. He is the author of “Farm Futures,” in Foreign Affairs (May/June 2009).

Dr. Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer was the first Executive Director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse, an organization that works to reduce political dysfunction and incivility in our political system. As a leader in the field of deliberative democracy, she works to restore our democracy to reflect the intended vision of our founding fathers.

Dr. Lukensmeyer previously served as Founder and President of AmericaSpeaks, an award-winning nonprofit organization that promoted nonpartisan initiatives to engage citizens and leaders through the development of innovative public policy tools and strategies. During her tenure, AmericaSpeaks engaged more than 200,000 people and hosted events across all 50 states and throughout the world. Dr. Lukensmeyer formerly served as Consultant to the White House Chief of Staff from 1993-94 and on the National Performance Review where she steered internal management and oversaw government-wide reforms. She was the Chief of Staff to Ohio Governor Richard F. Celeste from 1986-91, becoming the first woman to serve in this capacity. She earned her PhD in Organizational Behavior from Case Western Reserve University and has completed postgraduate training at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland.

On January 7, 2011, the John F. Kennedy School of Government announced that Trey Grayson, then completing his second term as Secretary of State in Kentucky, was named Director of the Institute of Politics. Grayson began service as Director on January 31, succeeding Interim Director John C. Culver.

Secretary of State Trey Grayson was elected to office in November of 2003 in his first run for political office. At the time of his election he was the youngest Secretary of State in the country. In 2007, he became one of only two Republican state-wide elected constitutional officers to win a second consecutive term in modern history. After taking office, Grayson quickly became a national leader in elections, civics, business services, and government innovation. He served as President of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) in 2009-2010.
A product of the Kenton County public school system, Secretary Grayson was inducted into the Kentucky Association for Academic Competition Hall of Fame for his achievements in the Governor’s Cup and other academic competitions at Dixie Heights High School. Grayson was a 1989 Governor’s Scholar and later served as President of the Program’s Alumni Association.

Secretary Grayson graduated with honors from Harvard College (A.B., Government, 1994) and from the University of Kentucky (J.D. 1998, M.B.A., 1998) where he was one of the first Kentucky MBA scholars and one of the first two Bert Combs Scholars, the College of Law’s top scholarship. He received one of the inaugural University of Kentucky College of Law Young Professional Awards. Prior to his election, he was an attorney with Greenebaum Doll & McDonald and Keating, Muething & Klekamp, where he focused on estate planning and corporate law.

Grayson is married to the former Nancy Humphrey of Lexington. Mrs. Grayson served the Commonwealth in a number of community organizations such as the Boone County Public Library Board of Trustees, the Family Nurturing Center, the United Way Impact Council for Children Prepared for Kindergarten, and Kindervelt, which raises funding for Cincinnati Children's Hospital. She also served on the Kentucky State Nature Preserves Commission, and was a member of Leadership Northern Kentucky (Class of 2009).

Lee H. Hamilton is the Director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University and one of the nation's foremost experts on Congress and representative democracy.

Hamilted represented Indiana in the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years, establishing himself as a leading figure on foreign policy, intelligence and national security. In the years since he left office in 1999, he has continued to play a leading role in public affairs.

Hamilton served as Vice Chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, known as the 9/11 Commission. He co-chaired the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel that assessed the situation in Iraq and in 2006 made recommendations on U.S. policy there. Until recently, he served as Co-Chair of the U.S. Department of Energy's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future with General Brent Scowcroft.

Among his published works are two books on the legislative branch - "How Congress Works and Why You Should Care" and "Strengthening Congress." He writes twice-monthly commentaries about Congress and what individuals can do to make representative democracy work better. A leader in the growing national movement to expand and improve civic education, he serves as a Co-Chairman of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools.

Hamilton was born in 1931 in Daytona Beach, Florida. His family relocated to Tennessee and then Evansville, Indiana. He graduated from DePauw University and Indiana University School of Law. A former high school and college basketball star, he was inducted to the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 1982. Before his 1964 election to Congress, he practiced law in Chicago and Columbus, Indiana. He has three children and five grandchildren.

Joseph (Joe) P. Kalt is the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He joined the faculty at Harvard in 1978 and is a specialist in the economics of industrial organization, antitrust, economic development, and government regulation. In addition to his academic positions, Professor Kalt serves as a Senior Economist with Compass Lexecon, a subsidiary of FTI Consulting. He has also served as a mediator and arbitrator in various private and intergovernmental disputes, and as an advisor to international governments. In 1987, he founded (with Stephen Cornell) the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. He continues to serve as the Project’s co-director and is a principal author of The State of the Native Nations: Conditions under U.S. Policies of Self-Determination (with the Harvard Project) and many other books. Professor Kalt received several awards including the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development’s First American Leadership Award in 2005 and along with Stephen Cornell, the National Congress of American Indians Public Service Leadership Award in 2010. Professor Kalt is chair of the Board of Directors of the Fort Apache Heritage Foundation, and is a member of the National Advisory Board of The Big Sky Institute, the Board of Directors of The Sonoran Institute, and the Honorary Advisory Board of the Centro Artistico y Cultural de Huachinera, Sonora, Mexico. Professor Kalt received his B.A. (1973) in economics from Stanford University, and his Ph.D. (1980) and M.A. (1977) in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Jim Pitofsky serves as the Managing Director, Strategic Alliances for the $3B+ John Templeton Foundation. He plays a vital role in the creation and management of new strategies for connecting and engaging with entrepreneurial philanthropic and business leaders around the world. His primary goals are to increase enthusiasm and engagement among highly influential people in specific areas already supported by the Foundation’s programmatic activities and to forge mutually beneficial alliances.

Prior to joining the Foundation, Mr. Pitofsky was Chief Strategy Officer at the $500M+ Arizona Community Foundation (ACF) where he oversaw strategic planning and execution, public policy, education, and strategic alliances, as well as ACF’s Center for Business Philanthropy. Prior to that, he served as the ACF’s Director of Education where he led education grantmaking and advised high net-worth donors on their education grantmaking. Mr. Pitofsky has also served as the Vice President and Acting President of the Echoing Green Foundation, supporting hundreds of social entrepreneurs around the world; the Deputy Director of the National Youth Leadership Council, one of the leading service-learning organizations in the U.S. and the world; and the Executive Director for Hands on Bay Area, the leading manager of corporate volunteerism in the Bay Area. Additionally, Mr. Pitofsky founded and directed an organization that worked internationally to create school/community and business/education partnerships and was adopted by the National Association of Partners in Education. During that time, he also served as the elected President of the National and Community Service Coalition and led their federal public policy efforts.

Throughout his career, Mr. Pitofsky has worked closely with CEOs, foundation executives, philanthropists, celebrities, policy-makers, and nonprofit leaders to advance philanthropy, education reform, leadership development, social entrepreneurship, community service, and racial and economic equity. He has been a speaker at the World Economic Forum (Davos), FORTUNE Magazine CEO Forum, the White House Conference on Philanthropy, the Milken Institute and hundreds of other convenings of corporate, philanthropic, and nonprofit leaders. He has also organized meetings around the world in places such as the White House and the Vatican. Mr. Pitofsky earned his B.A. from Stanford University and his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center where he was a Public Interest Law Scholar.

Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President-Elect Obama's transition advisory board.

He has written twelve books, including The Work of Nations, which has been translated into 22 languages; the best-sellers The Future of Success and Locked in the Cabinet; and his most recent book, Supercapitalism. Mr. Reich is co-founding editor of The American Prospect magazine. His commentaries can be heard weekly on public radio's "Marketplace."

In 2003, Reich was awarded the prestigious Vaclav Havel Vision Foundation Prize, by the former Czech president, for his pioneering work in economic and social thought. In 2008, Time Magazine named him one of the ten most successful cabinet secretaries of the century. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College, his M.A. from Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and his J.D. from Yale Law School.

Scott B. Simon is one of America’s most admired writers and broadcasters. He has reported from all fifty states, five continents, and ten wars, from El Salvador to Sarajevo to Afghanistan and Iraq. His books have chronicled character and characters, in war and peace, sports and art, tragedy and comedy.

His radio show, NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon, has been called by the Washington Post, “the most literate, witty, moving, and just plain interesting news show on any dial,” and by Brett Martin of Time-Out New York “the most eclectic, intelligent two hours of broadcasting on the airwaves.” Scott has won every major award in broadcasting, including the Peabody, the Emmy, the Columbia-DuPont, the Ohio State Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Sidney Hillman Award. He received the Presidential End Hunger Award for his coverage of the Ethiopian civil war and famine, and a special citation from the Peabody Awards for his weekly essays, which were cited as “consistently thoughtful, graceful, and challenging.” He has also received the Barry M. Goldwater Award from the Human Rights Fund. Recently, he was awarded the Studs Terkel Award.

He has hosted many television specials, including the PBS’s State of Mind, and Voices of Vision. The Paterson Project, won a national Emmy, as did his two-hour special from the Rio earth summit meeting. He co-anchored PBS’s Millennium 2000 coverage in concert with the BBC, and has co-hosted the televised Columbia-DuPont Awards. He also became familiar to viewers in Great Britain as host of the continuing BBC series, Eyewitness, and a special on the White House press corps. He has appeared as a guest and commentator on all major networks, including BBC, NBC, CNN, and ESPN.

Scott has contributed articles to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times of London, The Guardian, and Gourmet among other publications, and won a James Beard Award for his story, “Conflict Cuisine” in Gourmet. He has received numerous honorary degrees.

Sports Illustrated called his personal memoir Home and Away, “extraordinary…uniformly superb…a memoir of such breadth and reach that it compares favorably with Fredrick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes.” It was at the top of several non-fiction bestseller lists. His book, Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball, was Barnes and Nobles’ Sports Book of the Year. His novel, Pretty Birds, the story of two teenage girls in Sarajevo during the siege, received rave reviews, Scott Turow calling it, “the most auspicious fiction debut by a journalist of note since Tom Wolfe’s. . . always gripping, always tender, and often painfully funny. It is a marvel of technical finesse, close observation, and a perfectly pitched heart.” Windy City, his second novel, is a political comedy set in the Chicago City Council. Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other, an essay about the joys of adoption, was published in August 2010.

Scott is a native of Chicago and the son of comedian Ernie Simon and Patricia Lyons Simon. His hobbies are books, theater, ballet, British comedy, Mexican cooking and “bleeding for the Chicago Cubs.” Simon appeared as Mother Ginger in the Ballet Austin production of The Nutcracker. He is married to Caroline Richard, a fan of the Yankees and the French national soccer team. They have two daughters, Elise and Lina.

With a distinguished record of public service spanning nearly forty years, Senator Snowe holds the distinction of being only the fourth woman in U.S. history to be elected to both houses of Congress – and the first woman to serve in both houses of a state legislature and both houses of Congress.

A tireless advocate in the U.S. Senate on behalf of Maine, Senator Snowe has garnered national recognition as a consensus-builder. The first Republican woman to secure a full-term seat on the powerful Senate Committee on Finance, Senator Snowe is also the current Ranking Member and former Chair of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Additionally, she sits on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

In focusing her attention on key issues that matter to Maine and America, such as economic growth and deficit reduction, Senator Snowe is widely-regarded as a results-oriented leader and problem solver. Time and again, she has been a vigilant champion for legislative breakthroughs enacted into law, including the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act and the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act. She is also a recognized leader on the challenges of energy independence and job creation. In her position on the Small Business Committee, Senator Snowe has taken the lead on introducing common sense to the federal regulatory structure, working to require federal agencies to regularly review regulations to ensure that they are fair, effective, and efficient use of government resources.

With a can-do spirit and work-ethic emblematic of the great State of Maine she is so proud to represent in the United States Senate, Senator Snowe is widely regarded as one of the leading champions of bridging the partisan divide to solve the enormous challenges confronting the people of Maine and the nation, especially during these difficult economic times. In 2008, Esquire magazine cited Senator Snowe as one of the Ten Best Members of Congress – and, in 2006, Time named her one of America's 10 Best Senators.