Join reporter and local author Len Ackland for an afternoon reading with his new memoir, Don't Bury the Lede: From Trauma and Vietnam to Journalism.

About the Author:

Len Ackland is an accomplished journalist, author and retired CU Boulder journalism professor. While at the university he wrote Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West, the first detailed history of the controversial nuclear bomb factory south of Boulder. He also was founding director of CU’s Center for Environmental Journalism. Previously, Ackland was a reporter for the Des Moines Register, the Chicago Tribune, and other newspapers. While at the Register, he won the prestigious George Polk Award in 1978 for documenting mortgage lending discrimination, called redlining, in Des Moines. Later, as editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists magazine he crafted its special issue on the Chernobyl nuclear accident, which won a 1987 National Magazine Award.

About the Book:

Len Ackland’s memoir, Don’t Bury the Lede: From Trauma and Vietnam to Journalism, focuses on two intense, intertwined experiences that jolted and shaped his life. First came the horrific suicide of his father, a World War II veteran, in 1961. Len was seventeen. Years later, shocking information from his mother made him determined to eventually discover who and what put his father in such a dark place. When Ackland did, decades afterwards, he possessed the emotional distance and journalistic tools to learn the truth. He began assembling those skills during his second pivotal experience—the American War in Vietnam during 1967-68. He first volunteered with a humanitarian organization in Huế, then worked out of Saigon on a RAND Corp. study of the Viet Cong before becoming a freelance journalist to write the brutal truth about the war. He also worked on the Dan Ellsberg-Tony Russo defense team in the Pentagon Papers case. Having never taken a journalism class, Ackland describes some zany experiences on his road through professional journalism and university teaching.