Over the course of three decades, Barry Paris has won wide acclaim for his cultural and investigative reporting. In the past, he has served as a music critic and investigative reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a feature editor for The Miami Herald. He is a graduate of Columbia University and of the Institute for the Study of the U.S.S.R. in Munich, Germany. Paris is fluent in a number of languages, and has translated plays of the Russian dramatist Anton Chekov. The title of his lecture is "Song of Haiti: The Lives of Dr. Larimer and Gwen Mellon."