Ashley Parker, the featured speaker at Thursday evening’s Ann Devroy Memorial Forum, was one of 11 Washington Post reporters to share a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for their investigative reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The Pulitzer Prize is generally regarded as the highest honor a journalist a journalist can receive. This year’s winners were announced on Monday.
Parker, one of The Post‘s White House reporters, will discuss “Covering Washington in the Age of Trump” at 7 p.m. in Schofield auditorium on the UW-Eau Claire campus. Her presentation will headline the 21st annual Devroy Forum, and will also include her insights about working as a female reporter in today’s political environment. The event is free and open to the public.
The Forum was established to honor Devroy, a 1970 UW-EC journalism graduate who went on to be regarded as one of the best journalists ever to cover the White House, which she did for The Post and for the Gannett media chain. After her death from cancer in 1997, her family and her Washington Post colleagues established the Forum and the Ann Devroy Fellowship at UW-EC, to honor her memory and help preserve her journalistic legacy.
Each year, one outstanding UW-EC journalism major is selected for the fellowship, which includes a scholarship, an unpaid three-week residency at The Post during the winterim period in January and a paid summer internship at a Wisconsin newspaper. This year’s Devroy Fellow will be announced during the Forum program Thursday evening.
Parker, who began her journalism career as Maureen Dowd’s research assistant at The New York Times, has been covering Washington-based political activity since 2011. She will visit various UW-EC journalism classrooms during the day on Thursday to talk with students, as well as meeting with local media people immediately before her Forum talk.
Note: the home page photo shows Ann Devroy interviewing then-President Bill Clinton in 1996. (Photo by Robert Reeder, The Washington Post)