WATERVILLE (AP) – John F. Burns, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and The New York Times’ current bureau chief in Baghdad, is this year’s winner of Colby College’s annual Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award.

Burns, 62, is a longtime foreign correspondent for The New York Times who won the Pulitzer in 1993 for his coverage of the destruction of Sarajevo and war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in 1997 for his coverage of the Taliban’s regime in Afghanistan.

He has covered the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan and has been in Iraq since the lead-up to the war. Burns’ reporting activities have led to his arrest in China and Mozambique.

In July, he will become his newspaper’s London bureau chief. Burns will receive the award as well as an honorary doctor of laws degree from Colby in September.

“John Burns has fashioned a distinguished career in journalism, a career marked by a courage that makes him an outstanding recipient of this important honor,” said Ann Marie Lipinski, editor of the Chicago Tribune and chairwoman of Colby’s Lovejoy Selection Committee. “John’s work from Beijing to Baghdad has often put him in harm’s way, and his dedication to the story in the most threatening of circumstances sounds a poignant echo to Elijah Parish Lovejoy’s work.”

The Lovejoy award, which was established in 1952, is named for a native of Albion, Maine, and an 1826 graduate of Colby who was killed in 1837, in Alton, Ill., while defending his abolitionist newspaper against a pro-slavery mob.

Last year’s recipient was Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter for the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., whose journalistic efforts led to criminal convictions of Ku Klux Klansmen stemming from the Civil Rights era.

Other past recipients have included Studs Terkel, Bill Kovach, the late David Halberstam, Ellen Goodman and the late Daniel Pearl, who received the 2002 award posthumously.

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On the Net: www.colby.edu/lovejoy