Southeastern Louisiana University

Pulitzer Prize New York Times photojournalist is guest speaker for "Extreme Spring Break"

Contact: Christina Chapple

4/12/06

      HAMMOND – Pulitzer Prize winner Ozier Muhammad, who covered Hurricane Katrina as a staff photographer for The New York Times, will be a featured speaker at the orientation program for Extreme Spring Break at Southeastern Louisiana University.

      Muhammad’s presentation, scheduled for Wednesday, April 19, at 4 p.m. in the Student Union Theatre, is free and open to the public. Muhammad went to New Orleans immediately after the Hurricane Katrina evacuation began to cover the effects of the storm.

      Muhammad has been a professional photojournalist since graduating from Columbia College in Chicago in 1972. While serving on the staff of Newsday, he won a Polk award in news photography and shared the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting with Josh Friedman and Dennis Bell for a series of reports titled "Africa, the Desperate Continent."

      He has covered Africa extensively, working in Ivory Coast, Mali, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Kenya and other parts of the continent. For the Times, where he has worked since 1992, he covered the first non-racial election in South Africa, in which Nelson Mandela was elected president. Muhammad was also in Afghanistan immediately after the fall of the Taliban and a year later was embedded with the United States Marines in Iraq.

      So far, more than 150 students from University of Louisiana System institutions will participate in “Extreme Spring Break: Students Rebuilding Louisiana,” an intensive five-day program dedicated to building homes in the hurricane-ravaged area. Scheduled April 19-23, Extreme Spring Break includes three full days of working with Habitat for Humanity on homes in Hammond, Abita Springs, and Lake Charles. Students are using Southeastern and McNeese State University in Lake Charles as their home bases.

      In addition to Southeastern and McNeese, students will come from Grambling State University, Louisiana Tech, Nicholls State, Northwestern State, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of Louisiana at Monroe.

      Southeastern and the University of Louisiana System and its institutions are active participants of the American Democracy Project, a co-operative initiative of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), The New York Times, and AASCU Member-Institutions to increase civic engagement among college students. The project involves 183 campuses representing more than 1.7 million students.