New Canaan Library is pleased and honored to announce this year’s William Attwood Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Marie Yovanovitch, Former United States Ambassador to Ukraine. The event takes place on Thursday, May 11 at 7 PM in the Library’s Jim & Dede Bartlett Auditorium, preceded by a light reception at 6:30 PM.
Ambassador Yovanovitch will discuss her book Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir, an inspiring and urgent memoir by a pioneering diplomat who spent her career advancing democracy in the post-Soviet world.
Marie Yovanovitch is now a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is also a nonresident fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy of Georgetown University. She served as the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine (2016-2019), the Republic of Armenia (2008-2011), and the Kyrgyz Republic (2005-2008). She was the dean of the School of Language Studies at the Foreign Service Institute and the deputy commandant and international advisor at the Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy of the National Defense University. Earlier she served as the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, where she coordinated policy on European and global security.
The Attwood Lecture: Since 2001, the William Attwood Memorial Lecture has been a highly anticipated and well-attended event that invites discussion on global current events. The diplomat and journalist William Attwood helped to both define his era and shape the causes in which he believed. Mr. Attwood served under President Kennedy, as ambassador to both Guinea and Kenya. Ambassador Yovanovitch joins a list of esteemed lecturers including Arthur Schlesinger, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Richard Holbrook, David Brooks, and many others.