Katerine Zoepf ’96 Returns to Seven Hills for Speaker Series

Journalist and author Katerine Zoepf ’96 returned to the Hillsdale Campus to speak with Upper Schoolers about writing, global politics, and working in the Middle East as part of the Alumni Speaker Series.

Her essays, reviews, and features have appeared in The New York Observer, The New York Times Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Foreign Affairs Magazine, The Diplomat, and The New Yorker, among other publications, and she has reported for The New York Times from more than a dozen countries.  A past fellow at the New America Foundation, she has also taught journalism at New York University. She decided she wanted to become a writer as a second grader at Lotspeich and thanked her Seven Hills teachers for their guidance, encouragement, and support.

Zoepf commended the Upper Schoolers who submitted work to the Scholastic Writing and Arts Awards at a lunch held for them in the Commons.

“I think it is incredibly brave and cool that you guys decided to put your writing out there for judgement,” she said. “That is honestly the biggest hurdle of becoming a writer or a career that involves a lot of writing.”

She read an expert from her book “Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who are Transforming the Arab World” and spoke about reporting in different areas and countries to the journalism and global issues classes.

At the all-school meeting in The Schiff Center, she touched on the challenges of reporting on conflict in the Middle East for an American audience, how she chose what topics to write about, and the differences between writing news articles and her book.