News
Cokie Roberts Spoke at Manhattanville
Part of "Meet the Writers" Series
03.05.2008
On Wednesday, March 5, as part of the “Meet the Writers” series at Manhattanville College, journalist and New York Times Bestselling Author Cokie Roberts spoke to writers, teachers, students and members of the local community in Manhattanville's Reid Castle.
Roberts, 65, a former Manhattanville trustee and presenter of the Manhattanville Women’s Leadership Award, promoted her new book Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation, scheduled for release on April 8.
Roberts is contributing senior news analyst on National Public Radio and has written a number of other titles, including We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters and Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation.
Although she is an experienced reporter and seasoned author, she did not dictate specific writing rules to her listeners. Instead, she provided them with relevant examples from her own career.
She discussed her rigorous studentship in grammar school, and said, “I learned to write as a very little girl because I had no choice…it was absolutely drummed into us.”
Yet she explained that her early educational experience provided her with the discipline necessary for every writer. She told her audience that the way to begin each piece goes as follows: “You sit down and you write.”
Roberts says she often wakes up at 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. to do this—even in the midst of working, taking care of her four grandchildren and running her book campaign.
She laughed. “You become a bit crazy.”
However, she has continued to write for years, and has reaped the rewards for her hard work. In addition to winning the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for coverage of Congress, she received an Emmy in 1991 for her contribution to the ABC News Special “Who is Ross Perot?”
According to Roberts, the secret to making politics (or any other subject) compelling is to “find the images you need to tell the story—to work around the medium.”
Roberts added, “Don’t just write about the topic—you need to let your voice be heard.”
She read passages from Ladies of Liberty, which chronicles, in her factual but somewhat tongue-in-cheek narrative, the public and personal lives of women such as Abigail Adams and Martha Washington, whose efforts to raise their children and manage businesses while men were at war helped shape the country during the American Revolution.