The May 9th Annual Meeting of the South Orange/Maplewood Adult School will feature a special treat this year - an appearance by New York Times journalist Dan Barry.

A brief business meeting, including refreshments, will be held prior to the speech by Barry.  The Adult School presents an engaging program each year in its annual meeting agenda, in honor of Ted Gnagey, the late director emeritus of the Adult School.

A press release provided by the School states the following about Barry:

Barry has worked as a reporter for The New York Times since 1995 and as a columnist since 2003. He started out writing the “About New York” column before creating the “This Land” column nearly five years ago. In traveling to all 50 states, he has, among other experiences, witnessed an execution in Tennessee, visited a Yup’ik village in western Alaska, and interviewed Meinhardt Raabe, who played the Munchkin coroner in “The Wizard of Oz.”

Barry was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1994, the 2003 American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for deadline reporting, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s 2005 Mike Berger Award for in-depth human interest reporting. He has also written two books: Pull Me Up: A Memoir, published in May 2004, and City Lights: Stories about New York, a collection of his About New York columns, published in November 2007.