COVID-19 and its Uneven Impact on American Communities
Nevada Humanities is pleased to welcome journalists Sheri Fink and Eli Saslow to a virtual conversation around COVID-19 and its uneven impact on American communities. Sheri Fink’s investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina in 2009 has been followed by in-depth reporting on COVID-19 responses in New York City in 2020. Throughout his career, Eli Saslow has expertly woven stories together between racial unrest, poverty, and access to health care - stresses in every community across the United States that are linked inextricably. At this online event, Fink and Saslow interview one another about the devastating relationship between healthcare access, poverty, and poor health outcomes, as well as the uneven impact that COVID-19 has had on communities throughout the nation. The conversation is followed by an audience Q+A moderated by Christina Barr, Executive Director of Nevada Humanities. This event was live streamed on Thursday, November 19, 2020 at noon PST.
Photo by Jen Dessinger.
Sheri Fink, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for journalism and a National Magazine Award, reports on the intersections between medicine, natural disasters, and human-made conflicts. She is the author of Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, a landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina—and a suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice. After the floodwaters rose and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2013 by The New York Times, Five Days at Memorial also won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Ridenhour Book Prize, and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones, Fink received her MD and PhD from Stanford University. Her first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival, is about medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. More recently, Fink served as an executive producer on the Netflix documentary series Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak and has reported for The New York Times on the coronavirus pandemic; hurricanes in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico; and emergency response to mass shootings.
Photo by Joanna Ceciliani.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage for The Washington Post, Eli Saslow covers the impact of some of the most pressing national issues and policy decisions on individual lives, from racism and poverty to addiction and school shootings. His ongoing oral history project for The Washington Post, Voices from the Pandemic, collects the accounts of ordinary people touched by COVID-19. Saslow’s latest book, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist, charts the rise of white nationalism through the experiences of one person who abandoned everything he was taught to believe. Saslow won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for a yearlong series about food stamps in the United States, later collected into the book American Hunger.