Kirsten Scharnberg Hampton
Chief speechwriter—First U.S. Army
Sessions:Kirsten Scharnberg Hampton is chief speechwriter for First U.S. Army and writes primarily for five general officers and numerous other military leaders based throughout the U.S., from Rock Island Arsenal, Illinois; to Fort Hood, Texas; to Fort Knox, Kentucky. Kirsten began her career as a journalist, spending more than a decade at the Chicago Tribune. She began covering breaking news and courts in Chicago, moved to primarily working on long-form narrative features for the paper and Sunday magazine and eventually worked for more than five years on the national staff. As a national correspondent, she did numerous tours in Iraq and the Middle East, covering the war as an embedded journalist, working from the paper’s Baghdad bureau and traveling throughout the region. Kirsten has also worked from Africa, Asia and the Pacific as well as from the paper’s New York and Kansas City bureaus. Kirsten began her journalism career at The Des Moines Register and the Baltimore Sun.