AUSA Webinar Highlights Army Women, Their Stories
AUSA Webinar Highlights Army Women, Their Stories
Four women, all of them authors and veterans, will discuss the experiences of women in the Army during a webinar hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army.
The event, part of the Thought Leaders series, will begin at 2 p.m. Eastern March 24. It is free, but registration is required here.
Diane Carlson Evans, Kayla Williams, Shannon Huffman Polson and Eileen Rivers will share their struggles for equality, discuss the progress that has been made and what else needs to be done.
Evans, a former captain in the Army Nurse Corps who served in Vietnam, is the author of Healing Wounds: A Vietnam War Combat Nurse’s 10-Year Fight to Win Women a Place of Honor in Washington, D.C.
She is the founder of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation, where she served as president and CEO of the foundation’s board of directors for 30 years. Since the dedication of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in 1993, Evans has remained an active advocate in the veterans’ community focusing on healing the wounds of war, and she speaks nationally about the service and contribution of women during wartime.
Williams is the assistant secretary for public and intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Veterans Affairs. She is the author of Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army and Plenty of Time When We Get Home: Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War.
An enlisted soldier for five years, Williams previously was director of the Military, Veterans and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security. She also has served as director of the Center for Women Veterans at the VA and as a researcher at Rand Corp.
Polson, one of the first women in the Army to fly the AH-64 Apache helicopter, is the author of The Grit Factor: Courage, Resilience, and Leadership in the Most Male-Dominated Organization in the World.
She is the founder of The Grit Institute, a leadership organization committed to whole leader development and a focus on grit and resilience, and a veteran of the corporate world in the medical device and technology industries.
Rivers, author of Beyond the Call: Three Women on the Front Lines in Afghanistan, has been a journalist for more than 15 years and is currently a digital content editor for USA Today’s editorial page.
She also is a member of USA Today’s editorial board and is the founder of the paper’s Policing the USA microsite, which tracks what’s happening with police and policing across the country.
A former Arabic linguist in the Army, Rivers recently won an Emmy for her work on an in-depth, multi-part series on prisons and recidivism.