Forest Public Library

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Anderson Cooper will visit Scott County

By Chris Allen Baker, News Editor
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 1:27 PM CDT

FOREST — During an upcoming visit to the South, CNN broadcast news journalist Anderson Cooper is making a stop in Scott County within the next two months as part of an effort to help raise funds for the new Forest Public Library shelving campaign.

Cooper, who has family ties to Forest through cousins who live here, is expected to visit on Friday, May 14, according to family members who confirmed the visit late last week. He is expected to speak for one hour, from noon to 1 p.m., that day. He is expected to serve as a commencement speaker at Tulane University the next day.

A family spokesperson said Monday that Cooper, a book author in addition to broadcast journalist, will speak for approximately 30 minutes and take questions from the audience. Attempts to use the Forest Elementary Auditorium fell through on Tuesday but organizers were seeking a new location.

Cooper’s visit is the result of his local family’s membership in the Friends of the Forest Library organization which is conducting a fundraising campaign to raise $100,000 for shelving for the new library facility expected to be completed this summer. The family spokesperson said an invitation was extended to Anderson, who has visited Mississippi frequently, to make a public appearance.

Further details of his visit were still incomplete as of press time.

According to his CNN biography, Cooper anchors “Anderson Cooper 360°,” an award-winning provocative alternative on CNN/U.S. each weekday to the typical network evening newscast. Cooper, who joined CNN in December 2001, served as CNN's weekend anchor before moving to prime time in March 2003 following the war in Iraq and then to a two-hour, late evening timeslot in November 2005 following Hurricane Katrina, where he spent more than a month along the U.S. Gulf Coast and has returned regularly.

His reporting has also taken him abroad to Afghanistan, Iraq, Mexico and London. Additional international correspondence assignments during his career have included Bosnia, Iran, Israel, Russia, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa and Vietnam.

He also anchored much of CNN’s live coverage of the funeral of Pope John Paul II in the Vatican City in 2005 and traveled to Sri Lanka to cover the tsunami in 2004.

His book, Dispatches from the Edge, are memoirs about covering the South Asia tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and other news events, has topped the New York Times Bestsellers List and other bestseller charts.

Before joining CNN, Cooper was an ABC News correspondent and host of the network's reality program, The Mole, among his ABC assignments.

Cooper graduated from Yale University in 1989 with a bachelor of arts degree in political science. He also studied Vietnamese at the University of Hanoi. Cooper was born on June 3, 1967, in New York City, the younger son of the writer Wyatt Emory Cooper and the artist, designer, writer, and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, and is the great-great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt of the prominent Vanderbilt shipping fortune.