Helene Cooper

Helene Cooper (born April 22, 1966) is a Liberian-born American journalist who is a Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times. Before that, she was the paper's White House correspondent in Washington, D.C. She joined the Times in 2004 as assistant editorial page editor.

She was a member of The New York Times reporting team that received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for coverage of the 2014 Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa.^[2] Team members named by The Times were Pam Belluck, Cooper, Sheri Fink, Adam Nossiter, Norimitsu Onishi, Kevin Sack, and Ben C. Solomon.^[3]

At the Wall Street Journal, Cooper wrote about trade, politics, race, and foreign policy at the Washington and Atlanta bureaus from 1992 to 1997. From 1997 to 1999, she reported on the European Monetary Union from the London bureau. From 1999 to 2002, she was a reporter focusing on international economics; then assistant Washington bureau chief from 2002 to 2004.

In 2008 she published The House at Sugar Beach, a memoir published by Simon & Schuster about the Liberian coup of 1980 and its effect on the Coopers, who were socially and politically elite descendants of American freed slaves who colonized Liberia in the 19th century. The book received critical acclaim^[4] and was a National Books Critics Circle Award finalist in 2008 for autobiography.^[5]

Personal

Cooper was born in Monrovia, Liberia, and studied journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.^[6] Her ancestors include two early settlers of Liberia, Elijah Johnson and Randolph Cooper.

Bibliography

• The House at Sugar Beach, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008, ISBN 0-7432-6624-2.
• Editor of Pearl, Daniel At Home in the World. New York:The Free Press, 2002, ISBN 0-7432-4317-X.

Notes

External links

• Biography Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2004)
• Recent New York Times articles by Helene Cooper
• , Pulitzer Prize-winning articles on Ebola