Laura Ling

Laura Ling is an award-winning journalist whose harrowing 140-day detention in North Korea brought her face-to-face with fear isolation and the real possibility that she might never come home. Her survival and eventual release became a story of resilience courage and the unbreakable human will to persevere even in the darkest circumstances. Ling’s presentations are deeply personal and profoundly moving reminding audiences that strength is not the absence of fear but the decision to keep going despite it and that hope is the most powerful force we have when everything else is taken away.

In August 2009, the world watched as former president Bill Clinton landed back in the United States after securing the release of American journalist and keynote speaker Laura Ling and her colleague, Euna Lee, from captivity inside the most isolated country on earth: North Korea. Ling had been reporting on a story about the trafficking of North Korean women when she was violently apprehended by North Korean soldiers along the Chinese-North Korean border. Sentenced to twelve years in a labor prison, Ling endured months of captivity, which ended with a dramatic and unexpected turn of events.

Before her capture, Ling spent more than a decade shining a light on untold stories from around the world. She started her career in journalism as a producer at Channel One News and then joined Current TV as head of its journalism department. She also worked as a correspondent covering issues including slave labor in the Amazon, Mexico’s drug war, Internet censorship in China, and women’s rights in Turkey.

She is also the host of E! Investigates, a series of hour-long shows that tackle hard hitting stories.

Ling is co-author, with her sister, journalist Lisa Ling, of “Somewhere Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight To Bring Her Home.”

Journey of Hope

As a journalist, Laura Ling has spent a large part of her career focusing on human rights issues and struggles for freedom.  Ling talks about these experiences in addition to her own personal loss of liberty being held prisoner in one of the world’s most secretive, repressive nations and sentenced to twelve years hard labor for doing her work as a journalist.

Ling recounts her time in captivity, from moments when she feared she might never see her family again, to glimmers of humanity and compassion directed towards her by her captors, to the ways in which she fought to win back her freedom.  She talks about what sustained her throughout that terrifying period of isolation and how she was able to maintain hope.