University of Delaware
Office of Public Relations
UpDate - Vol. 16, No. 22, March 6, 1997



            Noted columnist to speak at Commencement May 31
     Columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, known and respected
worldwide for her sensitive and innovative reporting as a
foreign correspondent, will deliver the Commencement address
at the University on Saturday, May 31, before members of the
graduating Class of 1997 and their families and friends.
     "We are very pleased to have someone of Ms. Geyer's
stature accept our invitation to speak," Robert R. Davis,
director of the Office of Alumni and University Relations,
said, in making the announcement. She was one of the top
speaker choices selected by the graduating seniors who voted
in a poll conducted by his office last fall, Davis said.
     "As a pioneer journalist, she has covered revolutions
and coups from Guatemala to Bosnia with extraordinary
courage and insight, and we look forward to all Ms. Geyer
has to share," Davis said. "Her interview list reads like a
who's who of international leaders, and her recent book,
Americans No More: The Death of Citizenship, offers
reflective insights into the means by which ethnic
allegiances have taken precedence over our national
identity."
     The free public ceremony, which is held outdoors rain
or shine, will begin at 9 a.m. in Delaware Stadium.
     Geyer's career has been a whirlwind of groundbreaking
journalism: She was the first American journalist to stay in
the mountains and report on the Guatemalan guerrilla
movement; the first to find Dominican President Juan Bosch
in hiding during the Dominican Revolution and report his
views; the only American to interview Argentine President
Juan Peron; one of the first journalists to interview the
Ayatollah Khomeini; and the person who interviewed Prince
Sihanouk of Cambodia when all American reporters were
forbidden to enter the country. Her interview with Fidel
Castro resulted in the 1991 book, Guerrilla Prince: the
Untold Story of Fidel Castro.
     During the course of her career, Geyer was held by the
Palestinians as an Israeli spy, was imprisoned in Angola for
writing about the revolutionary government and posed as a
waitress at a Mafia wedding-an effort that earned her the
Chicago Newspaper Guild prize for best human interest story.
     Her career is detailed in her book, Buying the Night
Flight: The Autobiography of a Woman Foreign Correspondent,
first printed in 1981 and revised and issued in a second
edition in 1996.
     The new edition tells of her career in a man's world
and includes her eyewitness account of the fall of the
Soviet empire. It also chronicles her recent experiences as
a columnist.
     Born and reared on Chicago's South Side, Geyer
graduated from Northwestern University's Medill School of
Journalism.
     After earning her bachelor's degree in journalism in
1956, she spent a year in Austria as a Fulbright Scholar at
the University of Vienna, where she studied history and
German.
     After returning to the U.S., she wrote freelance
articles for the Chicago Tribune and worked as a reporter
for the Southtown Economist. In 1960, she joined the Chicago
Daily News.
     As the Daily News' Latin American correspondent for
three years, she wrote a nationally syndicated series on
Latin America that included interviews with Fidel Castro and
won the 1967 Overseas Press Club Award. She went on to
report for the Daily News from the Middle East, the USSR,
Vietnam and Africa.
     In 1975, she became a Washington, D.C.-based columnist
for the Los Angeles Times. Her column on international,
domestic and women's affairs and U.S. foreign policy is
distributed by Universal Press Syndicate and appears in
approximately 120 newspapers in the U.S. and Latin America.
     Her other books include The New Latins, The New 100
Years' War and The Young Russians. She contributes to many
magazines and is a regular panelist on Washington Week in
Review, a PBS show broadcast live from WETA in Washington.
     She has received numerous awards and honors.
                                                -Beth Thomas