Author Samantha Power will speak today at 5 p.m. in Corwin Pavilion about her book A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. There is no charge for admission.

Power is speaking as part of the “Global Forces in the Post-Cold War World” lecture series sponsored by the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, UCSB Arts & Lectures, the Global and International Studies Program and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.

It was announced last night that Power has won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for her book, which also won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award. The book is a study of American foreign policy, focused on the ethnic cleansing of Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Bosnians and Rwandans, using declassified cables, private papers, interviews with top Washington politicians and her own war zone reporting. In it, she examines American indifference and action since the end of the Holocaust. She also compares the United States’ current foreign policy concerning genocide to the American reaction to Hitler’s Final Solution in the midst of World War II.

Power is the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She was a war correspondent during the wars in the former Yugoslavia for U.S. News & World Report and The Economist. She also worked as a political analyst for the International Crisis Group in 1996 and helped to launch that organization in Bosnia.