Video Archives, Spring 2008: Dana Priest / Jim Wooten

The twice-a-year Foster Conference of Distinguished Writers regularly attracts some of the best writers in the country to campus for free public lectures and to work in hands-on and small-group sessions with students in the College of Communications.

Overall, 22 Pulitzer Prize winners have visited for the conference since 1999.

For the Fall 2008 session, visitors will be: William Raspberry, the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy Studies in the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University, and Amy Goldstein, a reporter for the Washington Post.

During the Spring 2008 session, visitors were Dana Priest of the Washington Post and Jim Wooten of ABC News.

Previous conferences have attracted writers such as: Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights; Diana Henriques of The New York Times; Anne Hull of the Washington Post; Jerry Kammer of Copley News Service; Walter Mears, retired Associated Press correspondent; Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Ken Fuson, staff writer o the Des Moines Register; Penn State alumnus Rod Nordland of Newsweek; Bill Lyon of The Philadelphia Inquirer; Sydney Schanberg, former New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winnner; Steve Twomey, a Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer; Alicia Shepard, senior writer for American Journalism Review; David Halberstam, who has authored numerous best-selling books; Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette; and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Richard Ben Cramer and David Maraniss as well as syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.

Larry Foster, a 1948 graduate of Penn State, and his wife, Ellen Miller Foster, a 1949 graduate, gave $500,000 in 1997 to endow the Foster Professorship in Communications to support new strategies for improving students' writing skills. The Fosters have also helped Penn State students through their support of the University Libraries, endowing the Larry and Ellen Foster Communications Librarian and funding Foster Auditorium, a tiered 134-seat facility designed to support library instruction and programming.

Award-winning writers Dana Priest (top) and Jim Wooten visited during the spring 2008 session of the Foster Conference.

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