2025 Commencement Speaker NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Nicholas D. Kristof has been an op-ed columnist for The New York Times since 2001, writing columns that appear twice a week. Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, grew up on a sheep and cherry farm near Yamhill, Oregon. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and then studied law at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, graduating with first class honors. He later studied Arabic in Cairo and Chinese in Taipei. After working in France after high school, he caught the travel bug and began backpacking around Africa and Asia. Kristof has lived on four continents, reported on six, and traveled to more than 160 countries. During his travels, he has had unpleasant experiences with malaria, mobs and an African airplane crash.
After joining The New York Times in 1984, initially covering economics, he served as a Times correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo. He also covered presidential politics and later was associate managing editor of The Times, responsible for Sunday editions. In 1990, Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, then also a Times journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China's Tiananmen Square democracy movement. They were the first married couple to win a Pulitzer for journalism. Kristof won a second Pulitzer in 2006, for commentary for what the judges called "his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world". He has won numerous other prizes including the George Polk Award, the Overseas Press Club award, the Michael Kelly award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Anne Frank Award.
Kristof was the first blogger on The New York Times website and the first to contribute a video to The Times site. A documentary about him, "Reporter," executive produced by Ben Affleck, aired on HBO. He left The Times in 2021 to run for governor of Oregon but returned a year later after being barred from the ballot. Kristof and WuDunn are authors of five best-selling books: "China Wakes," "Thunder from the East," "Half the Sky," "A Path Appears" and “Tightrope”. His memoir, “Chasing Hope,” will be published in 2024. Kristof has been a member of the boards of Harvard University and the American Association of Rhodes Scholars. He and WuDunn are the parents of Gregory, Geoffrey and Caroline. Kristof enjoys running, backpacking, and having his Chinese and Japanese corrected by his children.