Presiding: RICHARD J. NOVAK , Rutgers University, UCEA President
Speaker: JED HORNE, Former Editor and Reporter, The Times-Picayune

      Jed Horne, who for 20 years was an editor and reporter with The Times-Picayune, in New Orleans, is the author of Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City (Random House) which was nominated by the New York Public Library for the Helen Bernstein Award for best non-fiction book of 2006. Horne was born and educated in Massachusetts and cut his teeth as a journalist with the Boston Phoenix.
      Horne worked in New York throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s as a writer and editor, primarily with Time Inc. publications. In the late 1980s he moved to New Orleans and The Times-Picayune. Posted to Latin America in the early 1990s as the paper’s foreign correspondent, he was named city editor in 1994, the job he held when Katrina struck. He was subsequently named metro editor before leaving the paper earlier this year. His first book, Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2005) was nominated for the Edgar for best non-fiction crime book of the year, as well as for the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award.
      Horne’s reporting from Kobe, Japan, in late 2005 was honored by the American Planning Association. His bylined work on Katrina was included in submissions by the staff of The Times- Picayune for which the newspaper was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes in 2006. He is a graduate of Harvard University and is a longtime resident of the French Quarter.