Peter Canellos
GUEST SPEAKER
Peter S. Canellos is managing editor for enterprise at POLITICO, overseeing the site's magazine, investigative journalism, and major projects. He has also been POLITICO’s executive editor, leading the newsroom during the 2016 presidential coverage, and the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe.
Canellos is the author of The Great Dissenter, the Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero, which Publisher's Weekly named one of the top 20 nonfiction books of 2021.
A native of Boston, Canellos is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Law School. He spent most of his career at the Globe, where at various points he oversaw the paper’s local news coverage and the Washington, D.C., bureau.
As the Globe’s editorial page editor, he wrote numerous editorials urging Bostonians to overcome their parochial divisions and embrace their status as a world-class city.
In addition, he edited the Globe book Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy, which was a top 10 New York Times bestseller in 2009. The book set the stage for much of the analysis of Kennedy’s career after his death from cancer in 2009, and it supplied most of the anecdotes for President Barack Obama’s eulogy of Kennedy.
For the past 15 years, Canellos has worked with the International Women’s Media Foundation, overseeing the Elizabeth Neuffer fellowship, given to a female journalist to study human rights at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and intern at the Globe and New York Times. He has also traveled overseas on human rights trips with the U.S. Holocaust Museum, the International Reporting Project, and the Robert Bosch foundation, among other groups.
As an editor, Canellos has overseen two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects along with five others that were Pulitzer finalists, among many other awards. As a writer, he has been the recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors award in 2011 for excellence in editorial writing, the 2022 George Polk Award for national reporting, and the 2022 Toner Prize for political reporting.
