Samantha Power facts for kids

Samantha Power
Samantha Power
28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations
	In office; August 5, 2013 – January 20, 2017
President	Barack Obama
Deputy	Rosemary DiCarlo; Michele J. Sison
Preceded by	Susan Rice
Succeeded by	Nikki Haley
Personal details
Born	Samantha Jane Power ; September 21, 1970 (age 50); London, England
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Cass Sunstein (m. 2008)
Children	2
Education	Yale University (BA); Harvard University (JD)

Samantha Jane Power (born September 21, 1970) is an Irish-American academic, author, and diplomat who served as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. She is a member of the Democratic Party.

Power began her career as a war correspondent covering the Yugoslav Wars. From 1998 to 2002, she served as the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she later became the first Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy. She was a senior adviser to Senator Barack Obama until March 2008, when she resigned from his presidential campaign after apologizing for referring to then-Senator Hillary Clinton as "a monster."

Power joined the Obama State Department transition team in late November 2008. She served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights on the National Security Council from January 2009 to February 2013. In April 2012, Obama chose her to chair a newly formed Atrocities Prevention Board. As U.N. ambassador, Power's office focused on such issues as United Nations reform, women's rights and LGBT rights, religious freedom and religious minorities, refugees, human trafficking, human rights, and democracy, including in the Middle East and North Africa, Sudan, and Myanmar. She is considered to have been a key figure in the Obama administration in persuading the president to intervene militarily in Libya. In 2016, she was listed as the 41st most powerful woman in the world by Forbes.

Power is a subject of the 2014 documentary Watchers of the Sky, which explains the contribution of several notable people, including Power, to the cause of genocide prevention. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, a study of the U.S. foreign policy response to genocide. She has also been awarded the 2015 Barnard Medal of Distinction and the 2016 Henry A. Kissinger Prize.

Images for kids

Power speaking at Harvard Law School's Class Day (2010)
Power with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office on 5 June 2013
Power with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his office in Jerusalem, February 15, 2016
Power with John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, September 29, 2015