The 56th Hays Press-Enterprise Lecture at UC Riverside continues the tradition of bringing some of the most well-known journalists in the country to the UC Riverside campus. This year’s lecturer is Ari Shapiro, award-winning anchor of NPR's “All Things Considered”.

Ari has reported from above the Arctic Circle and aboard Air Force One. He has covered wars in Iraq, Ukraine, and Israel, and he has filed stories from five continents and most of the 50 states. Before becoming a host in 2015, he was NPR’s international correspondent based in London. Shapiro took on that role after four years as White House Correspondent during the Obama presidency. In 2012, he embedded with the presidential campaign of Republican Mitt Romney. He was NPR’s justice correspondent for five years during the George W. Bush administration. 

His work has been consistently recognized by his peers. He has won three national Edward R. Murrow awards. He was named “Journalist of the Year” in 2023 by NLGJA, the association of LGBTQ+ journalists. 

The Columbia Journalism Review honored him with a laurel for his investigation into disability benefits for injured American veterans. The American Bar Association awarded him the Silver Gavel for exposing the failures of Louisiana’s detention system after Hurricane Katrina. He was the first recipient of the American Judges’ Association’s American Gavel Award for his work on U.S. courts and the American justice system. And at age 25, Shapiro won the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize for an investigation of methamphetamine use and HIV transmission.