James kirchick biography
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Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Kirchick is a graduate of the Roxbury Latin School and Yale College.
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Among the many events he covered were the First Libyan Civil War, a stolen presidential election in Belarus, and revolution and ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan.Kirchick is currently a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council, and he has previously held fellowships at the Brookings Institution, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and the Robert Bosch Foundation in Berlin.
Kirchick has spoken at colleges and universities across the United States and at venues including the National Security Agency, the U.S.
Department of State, the Oslo Freedom Forum, the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, the Stockholm Free World Forum, the American Library in Paris, the Warsaw Security Forum, the Lennart Meri Conference in Estonia, and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Berlin. His talk was both moving and memorable, and afterwards, multiple people told me that it was the best presentation they had seen in our series.
James modeled a generous yet unflinching ability to have a discussion that seems lost on most citizens in our country. His first book, “The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age,” was published by Yale University Press in 2017, and he has contributed essays to the collections Fight for Liberty: Defending Democracy in the Age of Trump and New Threats to Freedom.
Recognized as a leading voice on American gay politics and international gay rights, Kirchick is a recipient of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Journalist of the Year Award.
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James Kirchick is a writer at large for Air Mail, a contributing writer to Tablet, and author of the instant New York Times bestseller, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.
We look forward to hosting him again in the future and opening the eyes of even more festival-goers. A truly independent voice who follows no party line, he has been lauded as “articulate, passionate, brave” by Stephen Fry, “fearless” by Andrew Sullivan, and “a kind of American reincarnation of my friend Christopher Hitchens” by Bernard Henri-Levy.
Kirchick is a contributing Opinion writer for the New York Times, a writer at large for Air Mail, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center.
Among other revelations, Kirchick tells of the World War II–era gay spymaster who pioneered seduction as a tool of American espionage, the devoted aide whom Lyndon Johnson treated as a son yet abandoned once his homosexuality was discovered, and how allegations of a “homosexual ring” controlling Ronald Reagan nearly derailed his 1980 election victory.
Magisterial in scope and intimate in detail, Secret City will forever transform our understanding of American history.