SPRINGFIELD, Mo., Feb. 21, 2023 — Drury University’s L.E. Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship will welcome reporter, author and kidnapping survivor Michael Scott Moore on Thursday, March 2 at 5:30 p.m. in the Lay Hall Auditorium. Moore was kidnapped in early 2012 on a reporting trip to Somalia and held hostage by pirates for 32 months. “The Desert and the Sea,” a memoir about that ordeal, became an international bestseller. In his talk entitled, “Somali Pirates Gave Me Toothpaste and Soap,” he will speak about parallels between hostage-taking and human trafficking.
As part of the 2022-23 Meador Center Speaker Series, this event is free and open to the public.
Some of Moore’s works include a comic novel about L.A., “Too Much of Nothing,” as well as a travel book about surfing, “Sweetness and Blood,” which was named a best book of 2010 by The Economist. He’s won Fulbright, Logan and Pulitzer Center grants for his nonfiction, as well as a Silver Nautilus Award in Journalism and Investigative Reporting; and Yaddo, MacDowell, and DeWitt Wallace–Reader’s Digest fellowships for his fiction. He’s been a visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts and UC Riverside and worked for several years as an editor and writer at Spiegel Online in Berlin.
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Media Contact: Jasmine Cooper, Director of University Communications and Media Relations – (417) 873-7390 or JCooper020@drury.edu.
