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"This country took me and my family in when we were at one of the lowest points of our lives and returned to me a feeling I had lost: that of being safe. I was so proud when I eventually took the oath of citizenship ..." – Helene Cooper, writing for The New York Times on January 31 about her refugee experience. A conversation with Helene Cooper is akin to a transatlantic adventure with an old-school journalist who has the inside stories. And she's gone into the trenches to get the stories. But she also came through a rugged experience in 1980 as her mother fled with her and her sisters from the madness that had become civil war Liberia. She wrote about the horror and the immigration experience vividly in The Times. She's currently Pentagon Correspondent for The Times, She also was on the paper's reporting team that won a 2015 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 2014 Ebola outbreak that reached from Africa into the heart of Dallas. Since the change of administration in Washington, she's reported from Baghdad on Defense Secretary Jim Mattis' trip to Iraq, outlined efforts by President Trump's cabinet to reassure European allies about strong U.S. support and explained why the Pentagon is "looking to lease space in Trump Tower." At The Times, she also has been both a diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent. Cooper, who studied journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, became a New York Times bestselling author with The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood, a memoir of Monrovia. Her latest book, about the woman who is credited with saving Liberia, is Madame President: The Extraordinary Story of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.