Iran in Context: Pulitzer Center CEO Lisa Gibbs' Conversation With Grantees Scott Anderson and Reza Sayah

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Please join Lisa Gibbs, CEO of the Pulitzer Center, in a timely conversation with Pulitzer Center grantees Reza Sayah and Scott Anderson about the war in Iran—and the role of journalism in helping illuminate the underlying causes of conflicts in the region.

Anderson will sign copies of his award-winning book King of Kings, a critical lens into the history of the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution, including the role of the United States. This event will also revisit Anderson's seminal project Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart, published by The New York Times Magazine in 2016. 

Sayah will provide a current perspective on the realities in Iran today, including views from citizens across the country—from senior officials to teachers, mothers, doctors, students, and shopkeepers.

• Doors open at 5:30pm
• Conversation begins at 6:10pm, followed by a Q&A 
• Book signing of King of Kings and Fractured Lands by Scott Anderson from: 7:30-8:00pm

Register here to reserve your seat.

Panelists

• Scott Anderson is an award-winning journalist who has reported from Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Northern Ireland, Chechnya, Sudan, Bosnia, El Salvador, and many other strife-torn countries. He is the author of two novels and six works of nonfiction, including international bestseller Lawrence in Arabia; Fractured Lands, a collaboration with the Pulitzer Center and The New York Times; and most recently King of Kings, the story of the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution. Anderson won the 2025 Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.
• Reza Sayah is a journalist and filmmaker based in Tehran, Iran. He has reported for international news organizations including PBS NewsHour, CNN, Al Jazeera, and France 24. Most recently, he reported on the Iran war. Last month, he was the first Western journalist to interview an active senior officer of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
• Lisa Gibbs is President and CEO of the Pulitzer Center. She joined the Center in 2024 after serving as Vice President of Philanthropic Development at The Associated Press (AP).  Before that she was a reporter for Money magazine, executive business editor for The Miami Herald and global business editor at the AP, leading a team of 60 journalists around the world. She also co-founded the Xana Fund to support women business journalists interested in becoming industry leaders.

King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution—A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

On New Year’s Eve, 1977, on a state visit to Iran, President Jimmy Carter toasted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth, praising Iran as “an island of stability “ due to “your leadership and the respect and admiration and love which your people give to you.” Iran had the world’s fifth largest army and was awash in billions of dollars in oil revenues.  Construction cranes dotted the skyline of its booming capital, Tehran.  The regime’s feared secret police force SAVAK had crushed communist opposition, and the Shah had bought off the conservative Muslim clergy inside the country.  He seemed invulnerable, and invaluable to the United States as an ally in the Cold War.  Fourteen months later the Shah fled Iran into exile, forced from the throne by a volcanic religious revolution led by a fiery cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini. The ensuing hostage crisis forever damaged America’s standing in the world.  How could the United States, which had one of the largest CIA stations in the world and thousands of military personnel in Iran, have been so blind?

The spellbinding story Scott Anderson weaves is one of a dictator blind to the disdain of his subjects and a superpower blundering into disaster. Scott Anderson tells this astonishing tale with the narrative brio, mordant wit, and keen analysis that made his bestselling Lawrence of Arabia one of the key texts in understanding the modern Middle East.  The Iranian Revolution, Anderson convincingly argues, was as world-shattering an event as the French and Russian revolutions.  In the Middle East, in India, in Southeast Asia, in Europe, and now in the United States, the hatred of economically-marginalized, religiously-fervent masses for a wealthy secular elite has led to violence and upheaval – and Iran was the template.  King of Kings is a bravura work of history, and a warning.

Fractured Lands

From the bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia, a piercing account of how the contemporary Arab world came to be riven by catastrophe since the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq. First featured as an entire issue of the New York Times Magazine that was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

In 2011, a series of anti-government uprisings shook the Middle East and North Africa in what would become known as the Arab Spring. Few could predict that these convulsions, initially hailed in the West as a triumph of democracy, would give way to brutal civil war, the terrors of the Islamic State, and a global refugee crisis. But, as New York Times bestselling author Scott Anderson shows, the seeds of catastrophe had been sown long before. In this gripping account, Anderson examines the myriad complex causes of the region’s profound unraveling, tracing the ideological conflicts of the present to their origins in the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 and beyond. From this investigation emerges a rare view into a land in upheaval through the eyes of six individuals—the matriarch of a dissident Egyptian family; a Libyan Air Force cadet with divided loyalties; a Kurdish physician from a prominent warrior clan; a Syrian university student caught in civil war; an Iraqi activist for women’s rights; and an Iraqi day laborer-turned-ISIS fighter. A probing and insightful work of reportage, Fractured Lands offers a penetrating portrait of the contemporary Arab world and brings the stunning realities of an unprecedented geopolitical tragedy into crystalline focus.