George Packer

columnist, New Yorker

George Packer is a staff writer for *The New Yorker* and the author, most recently, of *The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq*. That book, which traced America's entry into the Iraq war and the subsequent troubled occupation, won the Overseas Press Club's 2005 Cornelius Ryan Award and the Helen Bernstein Book Award of the New York Public Library, was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, and was named by *The New York Times* as one of the ten best books of the 2005. Packer has published two other works of non-fiction, *The Village of Waiting*, (1988), a memoir about his years in the Peace Corps in West Africa, and *Blood of the Liberals* (2000), a three-generational political history, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He has also published two novels, *The Half Man *(1991) and *Central Square*(1998), and was the editor of *The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World* (2003). His articles, essays, and reviews on foreign affairs, American politics, and literature have appeared in *The New York Times Magazine*, *Harper's*, *Dissent*, and other publications. He received the 2006 Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting from Georgetown and his magazine reporting has won three Overseas Press Club awards. He was a 2001-2 Guggenheim fellow and has taught writing at Harvard, Bennington, and Columbia. He lives in Brooklyn.