Commencement Speaker Ann Hagedorn '71
An award-winning author and journalist, Ann Hagedorn has been a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and special projects editor and investigative reporter for the New York Daily News. She has taught writing at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She also was an adjunct professor for creative nonfiction writing at Xavier University (Cincinnati) and is currently the Simons Fellow in Writing and Humanities at the Hall Center for the Humanities at University of Kansas.
Hagedorn is the author of four books, Wild Ride: The Rise and Tragic Fall of Calumet Farm, Inc., America’s Premier Racing Dynasty (Henry Holt & Co., 1994); Ransom: The Untold Story of International Kidnapping (Henry Holt & Co., 1998); Beyond the River: A True Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad (Simon & Schuster, 2003) and Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (Simon & Schuster, 2007). Savage Peace was the winner of the Ohioana Nonfiction Writing Award for 2008, the runner-up for the Society of Midland Authors nonfiction award in Chicago in 2008 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in history and for the National Book Award. Noted historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once said about Beyond the River, “It is as vivid in its narration as it is scrupulous in its scholarship.” Beyond the River also won the Ohioana Nonfiction Award in 2004. Wild Ride and Beyond the River are under option with Paramount Pictures and Clear Pictures, Inc., respectively.
Born in Dayton, Ohio, Hagedorn earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Denison in 1971, an M.L.S. in information science from University of Michigan and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University. During her senior year at Denison, she studied the Harlem Renaissance with Arna Bontemps at Yale University as preparation for her senior thesis. Hagedorn also earned a German language proficiency degree from Goethe Institut in Prien, Germany. Her first newspaper job was with the San Jose Mercury News where she wrote about crime and covered trials in San Francisco’s East Bay region. Her Wall Street Journal assignments included front page stories on white collar criminals, pennystock and securities fraud, the longest criminal trial in U.S. history and violent crime in shopping malls. At the New York Daily News, she wrote multi-part series on geriatric inmates in New York prisons and New York lawyers who were laundering money for Colombian drug cartels.
Hagedorn is currently working on her fifth book, an invesigative narrative about the privatization of the military worldwide, to be published by Simon & Schuster.