Events

Police Athletic League's 20th Annual Women of the Year Luncheon

16 October, 2008

The Police Athletic League (PAL) will hold its 20th Annual Women of the Year Luncheon at The Pierre on 5th Avenue at 61st Street, honoring Marie Brenner, Journalist & Author, Katie Couric, Anchor & Managing Editor of the CBS Evening News, Lucinda Franks, Pulitzer Prize winning Journalist & Author, and Patricia M. Hynes, Senior Counsel, Allen & Overy LLP and President of the New York City Bar. The reception begins at 11:45 a.m. with Liz Smith as Emcee. Margo Catsimatidis and Pamela J. Newman are Event Co-Chairs and Amelia Bernstein is Honorary Chair. Festivities include celebrity presenters and a raffle drawing. Proceeds support PAL youth centers.

Honorees

Marie Brenner is an author and Writer at Large for Vanity Fair. She has published five books, including Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women, the bestselling House of Dreams, The Bingham Family of Louisville and her latest novel, Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found, which has received extraordinary praise from The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review. She joined the staff at Vanity Fair in 1985 and has also been a contributing editor for New York Magazine and The New Yorker. She has contributed articles to The New York Times Magazine and Vogue. Her 2003 investigation of the rise of anti-Semitism in France ("France’s Scarlet Letter") made international news. Several of her works have been the basis for movies, including the 1999 movie, "The Insider," based on her expose of the tobacco industry, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture.

Katie Couric is the Anchor and Managing Editor of the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, a 60 Minutes correspondent, anchor of CBS News primetime specials and contributes daily to CBSNews.com. In 2006, she became the first female solo anchor of a weekday network evening news broadcast and recently received the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Newscast in 2008. Prior to joining CBS, Ms. Couric had a 15-year run as co-anchor on NBC News’ "Today." She has won six Emmy Awards, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award, a National Headliner Award, UNICEF’s Danny Kaye Humanitarian Award, and the George Foster Peabody Award for her series on colon cancer, after losing her husband to the disease. In September 2008, Couric, Charles Gibson and Brian Williams collaborated in a one-hour primetime program, Stand Up to Cancer – an unprecedented tri-network effort.

Lucinda Franks, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, has been writing for The New York Times since the mid-1970s. She contributes to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and New York, among other publications. Ms. Franks is also the author of the nonfiction book, Waiting Out a War and the novel, Wild Apples. Recently, she was named a finalist for the 2007 Borders Best Original Voices award for nonfiction for My Father’s Secret War, which has been optioned for a film by Donald and Keifer Sutherland.

Patricia M. Hynes is a trial lawyer, specializing in complex securities, commercial and criminal matters. She is listed in the 2008 edition of Corporate Counsel's "Super Lawyers," has been listed in The American Lawyer's "The Best Lawyers in America: Annual Guide to Commercial Litigation" and named by the National Law Journal as one of the "50 Most Influential Women Lawyers in America." Ms. Hynes became President of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York in 2008, and received the Robert F. Wagner, Jr. Award from Citizens Union for her contributions and exemplary leadership in strengthening the civic life of New York City. She has served as a law clerk to the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York.

Liz Smith, Emcee

Place

The Pierre, Fifth Avenue at 61st Street

Special Guests Include

Uma Thurman, Robert M. Morgenthau, Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, Lesley Stahl, Melania Trump, Tina Brown, and Dina Merrill

Co-Chairs

Margo Catsimatidis, Pamela J. Newman, Honorary Chair: Amelia Bernstein