Tom Ashbrook

THOUSAND OAKS, CA - The January taping of National Public Radio show “On Point” in Santa Barbara is sold out, but fans can visit with host Tom Ashbrook the next morning at California Lutheran University.

The award-winning journalist will discuss highlights from his career when KCLU presents “Coffee and Conversation with Tom Ashbrook” at 10 a.m. Jan. 23 in Samuelson Chapel on the Thousand Oaks campus.

Nearly 2 million NPR listeners across the country listen to Ashbrook each week. "On Point" unites distinct and provocative voices with passionate discussion as it confronts important stories.

Ashbrook joined NPR in 2001 after he was enlisted to provide special coverage following the attacks of 9/11. He has spent more than 20 years as a foreign correspondent, newspaper editor and author. He spent 10 years in Asia, starting at the South China Morning Post and then working as a correspondent for The Boston Globe. Ashbrook was based in India, Hong Kong and Japan. He began his reporting career covering the refugee exodus from Vietnam and the post-Mao opening of China. He has also covered the turmoil and shifting cultural and economic trends in the United States and around the world, from Somalia and Rwanda to Russia and the Balkans. At the Globe, where he served as deputy managing editor until 1996, he directed coverage of the first Gulf War and the end of the Cold War. Ashbrook received the Livingstone Prize for National Reporting in 1996.

He was serving as a fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation when he decided to leave the Globe and take a four-year plunge into Internet entrepreneurship. He and a college friend launched what became homportfolio.com. Ashbrook chronicled the experience in the book “The Leap: A Memoir of Love and Madness in the Internet Gold Rush.”

Raised on an Illinois farm, Ashbrook studied American history at Yale and Gandhi’s independence movement at Andhra University in India. Before taking up journalism, he worked as a surveyor and dynamiter in Alaska’s oil fields, a teaching fellow with the Yale-China Association, a Hong Kong television personality and a producer of international editions of Chinese kung fu films.

“Coffee and Conversation” is a fundraiser for KCLU, a community service of Cal Lutheran. Tickets are $30. To purchase tickets, call KCLU at 805-493-3900.

KCLU, the first station on the West Coast to carry "On Point," airs the show from 9 to 11 a.m. weekdays. The award-winning NPR affiliate serves more than 100,000 listeners on 88.3 FM in Ventura County, 102.3 FM and 1340 AM in Santa Barbara County, 89.7 FM on the Central Coast, 92.1 FM in San Luis Obispo and online at kclu.org.