About the Speakers

Lydia Polgreen

Lydia Polgreen became an Opinion columnist for The New York Times in 2022. She is also a host on the weekly Opinion podcast, “Matter of Opinion.”

Ms. Polgreen previously served as managing director of Gimlet, a podcast studio at Spotify, and as editor in chief of HuffPost, leading a team of hundreds of journalists publishing 16 editions across the globe in nine languages.

She joined HuffPost in January 2017 after a 15-year career at The New York Times that included roles as associate masthead editor, deputy international editor, South Africa bureau chief, correspondent for the New Delhi bureau and chief of the West Africa bureau. Before joining The Times, Ms. Polgreen was a staff writer for The Orlando Sentinel and The Albany Times Union.

Ms. Polgreen was a 2006 recipient of the George Polk Award for foreign reporting, in recognition of her travels deep into the war-torn western regions of Sudan to report on the carnage in Darfur.  She received the 2008 Livingston Award for international reporting for her series “The Spoils,” an account of how the scramble for Africa’s mineral wealth has brought misery and exploitation. In 2011 she was awarded the Columbia University Medal for Excellence.

Ms. Polgreen grew up in Kenya, Ghana and Minnesota. She currently resides in New York with her wife.

Connie Walker

Connie Walker (Cree) is a Pulitzer and Peabody award-winning investigative journalist and host of the Gimlet Media podcast Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s.

In 2021, Connie launched the acclaimed podcast series Stolen: The Search for Jermain which was featured in Vanity Fair, The Rolling Stone, Vulture and The New York Times.

Prior to joining Gimlet Media, Walker hosted the CBC News podcast Missing & Murdered, which focuses on the unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. In 2018, Missing & Murdered: Finding Cleo won the inaugural Best Serialized Story award at the Third Coast International Audio festival. The podcast was also featured in the Columbia Journalism Review, The Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, Chatelaine and was named one of the Best Podcasts of 2018 by Apple Canada.

Walker is a member of the Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan. She lives with her family in Toronto.