Does death always have to be a taboo subject?
On Wednesday's Up to Date, Steve Kraske talks with Pultzer Prize-winning columnist Ellen Goodman about her thoughts on dealing with the subject gracefully as we broadcast live from the Center for Practical Bioethics' Joan Berkley Bioethics Symposium.
Ellen Goodman co-founded The Conversation Project as a result of her experience with her mother’s death.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, Ellen Goodman began her career as a researcher for Newsweek magazine in the days when only men wrote for the newsweekly. She landed a job as a reporter for the Detroit Free Press in 1965 and, in 1967, for The Boston Globe where she began writing her column in 1974. It’s been syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group since 1976. A 1963 cum laude graduate of Radcliffe College, Ellen returned to Harvard in 1973-74 as a Nieman Fellow, where she studied the dynamics of social change. In 2007, she was a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she studied gender and the news. As the first Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Professional Journalism she taught at Stanford in 1996. Ellen’s first book, Turning Points (Doubleday, 1979), detailed the effect of the changing roles of women on the family. Six collections of her columns also have been published: Close to Home (Simon & Schuster, 1979); At Large (Summit Books, 1981); Keeping in Touch (Summit Books, 1985); Making Sense (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989); and Value Judgments (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1993) and Paper Trail: Common Sense in Uncommon Times (Simon & Schuster, 2004). She is also co-author with Patricia O’Brien of I Know Just What You Mean: The Power of Friendship in Women’s Lives (Simon & Schuster, 2000). Ellen won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 1980. She’s won many other awards, including the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award in 1980. She received the Hubert H. Humphrey Civil Rights Award from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in 1988. In 1993, The National Women’s Political Caucus gave her the President’s Award. In 1994, the Women’s Research & Education Institute presented her with their American Woman Award. In 2008, she won the Ernie Pyle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Society of Newspaper columnists.
