Lorissa Rinehart - Dickey Chapelle Trailblazing Female War Correspondent
Program Date: November 11, 2026
Lorissa Rinehart is an author, cultural producer, and public speaker. Her writing explores women's history, politics, war, and their points of intersection. Her debut book, First to the Front: The Untold Story of Dickey Chapelle, Trailblazing Female War Correspondent received rave reviews from The Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. She holds an MA from NYU in Experimental Humanities.
Her debut book describes Milwaukee native Dickey Chapelle, who from 1945 to 1965, covered almost every major conflict from WWII to Vietnam. She was the only woman on the front lines of Okinawa.
She survived six weeks of solitary confinement in a communist Hungarian prison. She marched beside the FLN in Algeria and found her way to Castro's camp in the Sierra Maestra mountains. She paratrooped with the 82nd, 101st, and Vietnamese Airborne, embedded herself with Special Forces in Laos and lived for a month with an anti-communist guerrilla army in the Mekong Delta. While on patrol with some of the first combat Marines deployed to Vietnam in 1965, she was killed by an improvised explosive. She is buried in Forest Home Cemetery.
Dickey's writing and photographs chronicle the arc of the Cold War like no other journalist. And yet, her work is almost unknown. That is until now with Rinehart's writing.