Lori Hope

Lori Hope is an author, producer, and public speaker with more than 25 years experience as a communications professional. A former newspaper editor-in-chief and award-winning journalist who developed hundreds of medical news reports and documentaries for television broadcast, her dozens of honors include two regional Emmys and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, National Associated Press Broadcasting Award, and Sigma Delta Chi Award.

Hope's widely-read book, Help Me Live: 20 Things People with Cancer Want You to Know (Ten Speed Press/Celestial Arts, 2005), has been featured in media including Redbook magazine, US News & World Reports, ABC News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous major market television and radio programs. Hope, a lung cancer survivor who quit smoking seventeen years before her diagnosis, has written essays and opinion pieces that have appeared in Newsweek and other publications and have been broadcast on hundreds of public radio stations nationwide. One of her essays appears in a McGraw-Hill college English textbook anthology with works by Barbara Ehrenreich, Eric Schlosser, and Nelson Mandela. Her broadcast work has appeared on CBS, ABC, PBS, HBO, and NBC stations, and she has been a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show.

Hope has lectured about conscious and compassionate communication, as well as smoking cessation and addiction and the stigma of lung cancer, at institutions including Tulane University Medical School and UCLA, and has presented before the American Cancer Society, the Jewish Federation of Silicon Valley, and the American Thoracic Society International Conference. She frequently makes public presentations not only about communicating with cancer patients, but with anyone who is suffering from any illness or condition, even depression. Her speeches are based in part on the findings of research she conducted in writing Help Me Live: 20 Things People with Cancer Want You to Know, which include interviews with authorities including Jimmie Holland, MD (Memorial-Sloan Kettering psychiatrist, creator of the field of Psyco-Oncology, and author of the classic, The Human Side of Cancer);Wendy Harpham, MD (author of Happiness in a Storm); and Jerome Groopman, MD (New Yorker staff writer, author of The Anatomy of Hope, and Harvard professor and physician);

A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Hope earned a BA in Philosophy before becoming a journalist and working at several network affiliate stations in St. Louis, Portland, Oregon, and other markets. She taught documentary production in San Francisco at the nation's most advanced non-commercial media access and training center, Bay Area Video Coalition, for more than a decade, chaired her temple's social action committee for three years, and has served on numerous nonprofit boards. Currently, she is a member of the executive board of the Bonnie J. Addario/A Breath Away from the Cure Foundation; the California steering committee of The Lung Cancer Alliance; and the honorary board of The Cancer League.

Follow Hope on Twitter @lorihope.