Susan Rice, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, announced to the UN press corps on July 20 that Mark Kornblau, her spokesman and the spokesman for the US mission since 2009, is leaving and will be succeeded by Erin Pelton, a director of communications and assistant press secretary for the National Security Council.
“I’m very, very grateful to him for his service to the mission and to our country,” Rice said at the UN, speaking after the resolution extending the UN mission in Syria passed. “And we’re very pleased to welcome Erin Pelton as his successor.”
Pelton graduated from Drake University in Des Moines with a degree in international relations and Latin American studies and has a master’s degree from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Â She also spent six years at the State Department in Washington, D.C., Saudi Arabia and Mexico and was a spokeswoman in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, working with Jeffrey Feltman, who was assistant secretary. Feltman recently became under secretary-general of the UN’s Department of Political Affairs.
Kornblau is to become managing director of corporate communications at JP Morgan Chase. Before his post at the US mission to the UN, Kornblau was a senior adviser and national spokesman for the Democratic presidential nominee campaign of John Edwards from 2007 to 2008. Kornblau testified in the recent trial of Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, in which he was ultimately acquitted on charges of election finance fraud, conspiracy and making false statements. Kornblau has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin.
Dulcie Leimbach is a co-founder, with Barbara Crossette, of PassBlue. For PassBlue and other publications, Leimbach has reported from New York and overseas from West Africa (Burkina Faso and Mali) and from Europe (Scotland, Sicily, Vienna, Budapest, Kyiv, Armenia, Iceland and The Hague). She has provided commentary on the UN for BBC World Radio, ARD German TV and Radio, NHK’s English channel, Background Briefing with Ian Masters/KPFK Radio in Los Angeles and the Foreign Press Association.
Previously, she was an editor for the Coalition for the UN Convention Against Corruption; from 2008 to 2011, she was the publications director of the United Nations Association of the USA. Before UNA, Leimbach was an editor at The New York Times for more than 20 years, editing and writing for most sections of the paper, including the Magazine, Book Review and Op-Ed. She began her reporting career in small-town papers in San Diego, Calif., and Boulder, Colo., graduating to the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and then working at The Times. Leimbach has been a fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies as well as at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; taught news reporting at Hofstra University; and guest-lectured at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the CUNY Journalism School. She graduated from the University of Colorado and has an M.F.A. in writing from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
