CNN’s Marcus Mabry to be Honored at Carver Gala
Award-winning journalist and author Marcus Mabry to receive the Child of America award
CNN’s Marcus Mabry is the Carver Foundation of Norwalk’s Child of America Honoree to be awarded on Friday, April 28, 2017, at the 16th annual Child of America gala at Wee Burn Country Club in Darien.
“Marcus Mabry’s story of achievement is inspiring to our students and to the Carver community alike,” said Novelette Peterkin, Carver’s Executive Director. “We are grateful for the opportunity to honor Mr. Mabry along with our Community Builder honoree, Austin McChord, CEO of Datto, this year.”
Since 2002, past honorees include the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Roger Wilkins; Geoffrey Canada, the then-President and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone; Cynthia Thompson, when she was National Chair of The Girl Scouts Of America; and Helene Gayle, when she served as CEO of CARE.
The Director of Mobile News Programming at CNN, Mabry leads the team responsible for getting CNN’s stories and videos on smart phones, watches, tablets and other mobile devices. Before coming to CNN, Mabry was the first editor of Twitter Moments, Twitter’s news product. And before that he spent 8 years as an editor at The New York Times and spent 19 years at Newsweek.
Mabry began his career at his hometown newspaper, The Trentonian in Trenton, New Jersey, where he was raised by a single mother and benefited from many government programs to help the poor, including welfare, Head Start and college grants. He attended The Lawrenceville School, where he is a trustee today, on full scholarship and then attended Stanford University, where he earned his bachelor and master degrees in four years.
After working at The Trentonian, he interned at The Boston Globe and then Newsweek. He ended his career there as the Chief of Correspondents, responsible for managing and deploying the magazine’s domestic and international correspondents, after stints as a State Department Correspondent in Washington, a foreign correspondent in Paris and Johannesburg and an editor based in New York. At The New York Times, Mabry was the International Business Editor, the associate national editor covering politics, a webcast anchor and a digital editor.
Mabry’s first book, published in 1995 when he was 28 years old, is the memoir White Bucks and Black-Eyed Peas: Coming of Age Black in White America (Scribner’s), which retells his journey from poverty to prep school to the summits of American news media. His second book is the groundbreaking Twice as Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power (Modern Times/Rodale, 2007), an intimate examination of the life and career of then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
The winner of numerous journalism prizes – including the New York Association of Black Journalists’ Trailblazer and Personal Commentary awards, as well as the Overseas Press Club’s Morton Frank Award for Best Business Reporting – Mabry was also the 1999-2000 recipient of the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Press Fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Mabry graduated with honors from The Lawrenceville School in 1985, and from Stanford University in 1989 with B.A. degrees in English and French literatures and International Relations and a Masters with distinction in English. He also studied at the Sorbonne and the Institut des Etudes Politiques de Paris.
In addition to The New York Times, his work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, The Davos Daily, and the South African Institute of International Affairs’ 1999 Year Book.
He has keynoted conferences on democracy (U.S. Embassy-Vienna, 2000); diversity (The Six Banks, The City, London, 2001 and 2002); and education (International Studies Schools Association, 2006).
He has been a frequent television commentator on politics, world affairs and public opinion on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. Fluent in French, in addition to being an occasional contributor to BBC Radio’s French language service, Mabry has also produced and anchored the television newsmagazine Reportages on TF1 (Télévision Française).
About the Carver Foundation of Norwalk
Carver is the largest provider of after-school programs for middle and high school students in Norwalk. Carver’s college-prep Youth Development Program is conducted in the Carver Community Center, in Norwalk’s four middle and two comprehensive high schools, and in Side by Side Charter School. Programming led by certified teachers within each participating school compliments the school day curriculum with project-based and personalized learning. We provide free transportation. Carver conducts a K-5 after school program at the Carver Community Center called CASPER. Carver summer learning programs include Summer Enrichment (5- to 13-year-old students at two sites); Freshman Summer Success Academies for graduated 8th-grade students transitioning into 9th grade at Norwalk and Brien McMahon High Schools; and summer learning experience for 5th-grade students transitioning into middle school. Carver Community programming includes college scholarships, winning basketball teams, international learning opportunities, parent leadership, health and wellness programming, spring and fall college tours, food drives, community holiday events and more for the benefit of Carver students and the Norwalk community. Since 2005, 100 percent of Carver’s seniors have graduated on time and nearly 100% of our graduates go on to college.