Tuesday's Speaker David Von Drehel's bio is below:

DAVID VON DREHLE is an Editor-at-large for Time magazine and written many cover stories for that publication.  Featured stories include the Supreme Court’s health care decision and the death of Osama bin Laden. His essay on the 2008 Time Person of the Year, Barack Obama, anchored the bestselling issue in the history of Time magazine. His work has been featured on a wide variety of television and radio programs, including “Today,” “The NBC Nightly News,” “The News Hour,” and “Morning Edition.”

Prior to joining Time in 2007, Von Drehle was a senior writer and Assistant Managing Editor at The Washington Post, where he covered national politics and led the paper’s renowned features and culture section, "Style". His work for The Post has been collected in a number of anthologies, including “America’s Best Newspaper Writing.”

Von Drehle is the author of four books, including the award-winning bestseller “Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year.” His acclaimed account of the famous Triangle shirtwaist factory fire, “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America” has been called “social history at its best” by the New York Times; it remains a staple of high school and college history classes across the country.

 

A graduate of the University of Denver and Oxford University (where he was a Marshall Scholar), Von Drehle lives in Kansas City with his wife and journalist, Karen Ball, and their four children.