Foreign correspondent Paul Salopek has reported from 20 conflicts around the world and 50 countries, mostly in the developing world. In 2006 he was imprisoned for five weeks in Darfur, where he endured beatings and brutal jail conditions but declined freedom until he knew his Chadian driver and Sudanese translator would also be freed. Salopek was selected to receive the 2009 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism and was slated to speak at the Lovejoy Convocation Oct. 18.

As a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, Salopek won the Pulitzer Prize twice for individual work: in 2001 for reporting from the civil war in Congo and in 1998 for a profile of the Human Genome Diversity Project. He is a regular contributor to National Geographic magazine and is in residence at Princeton University as a McGraw Writing Fellow this year.