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Georgie Anne Geyer (born April 2, 1935) is an American journalist and columnist for the Universal Press Syndicate. Her columns focus on foreign affairs issues and appear in approximately 120 newspapers in North and Latin America. She is the author of several books, including a biography of Fidel Castro. Geyer was born in Chicago. She graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1956, where she was a member of Alpha Chi Omega sorority. She attended the University of Vienna on a Fulbright Scholarship. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Russian. Her first job was with the Chicago Southtown Economist . From 1959 to 1974, Geyer was a reporter for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News , where she worked from society reporting to the news desk and eventually foreign correspondent. After leaving the paper she began her syndicated column. In 1973, she was the first Western reporter to interview Saddam Hussein, then Vice President of Iraq, and has also interviewed Yasser Arafat, Anwar Sadat, King Hussein of Jordan, Moammar Gadhafi, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. She has reported on rebels in the Dominican Republic, held by authorities in Angola for her reporting during the civil war, and threatened with death by the White Hand death squads in Guatemala. Geyer has more than 21 honorary degrees, including three from Northwestern alone. Her life story was adapted into the sitcom Hearts Afire , which ran on CBS in the 1990s; Markie Post played a columnist and correspondent named Georgie Anne Hartman.
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