CBH Talk: Marie Yovanovitch
Former Ukranian ambassador Marie Yovanovitch electrified the nation by speaking truth to power during the first impeachment of Donald Trump. In her urgent and inspiring memoir Lessons from the Edge Yovanovitch reclaims her narrative, describing the smear campaign against her, the impeachment inquiry’s blinding lights, and the abuse of power she witnessed at the highest levels. The case she makes for the US to ‘get its house in order,’ renew and repair our own democracy, and defend those around the world could not be more timely. Join her for this important conversation moderated by Keith Gessen, co-founder of n+1 and contributor to The New Yorker and the London Review of Books.
Participants
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Marie Yovanovitch served as U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan, in addition to other senior government positions during her thirty-three- year diplomatic career. She retired from the State Department in 2020 and is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a non-resident fellow at Georgetown University. She has received multiple awards, including the Presidential Distinguished Service Award (twice), the Secretary’s Diplomacy for Freedom Award, the Trainor Award for Excellence in the Conduct of Diplomacy, and the PEN/Benenson Courage Award. She lives in the Washington, DC, area.
Photo by Brad Tent
Keith Gessen was born in Moscow in 1975 and came to the United States with his family when he was six years old. He is a co-founder of the literary magazine n+1 and the author of the novels All the Sad Young Literary Men and A Terrible Country. A contributor to the London Review of Books and The New Yorker, he has also written for n+1, the Nation, and the New York Times Magazine. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or co-translator from Russian of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl. Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia and lives in New York with his wife and sons.
Photo by Nina Subin
