A free public forum featuring author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam will be at 7 p.m. tonight in Schwab Auditorium in conjunction with the fall Foster Conference of Distinguished Writers.

The two-day event will also include a session with Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, at 10:10 a.m. tomorrow in the Foster Auditorium of Pattee.

In 1964, Halberstam captured the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Vietnam War for The New York Times. His last 13 books have reached The New York Times bestseller list. Halberstam's latest, Firehouse, is a portrait of Engine 40, Ladder 35 in Manhattan, which lost 12 of its 13 firefighters at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

An editorial page editor since 1962, Greenberg won the Pulitzer Prize for editorials in 1969.

In 1981, he won the American Society of Newspaper Editors award for distinguished commentary.

Larry Foster, a 1948 graduate of Penn State, and his wife, Ellen Miller Foster, a 1949 graduate, donated $500,000 in 1997 to endow the Foster Professorship in Communications to support new strategies for improving the writing skills of students.