Lena Nelson on America's Youngest Ambassador

Lena Nelson is a writer, teacher and citizen historian who has spent seventeen years researching and documenting the story of Samantha Smith and creating www.SamanthaSmith.info, the online archive of news articles and videos about Samantha Smith. She was a nominee for the Allegra Johnson Prize and has worked with numerous news, educational, and humanitarian organizations around the world. She lives with her family in Southern California. America's Youngest Ambassador: The Cold War Story of Samantha Smith's Lasting Message of Peace, explores how nuclear paranoia that engulfed the US and the Soviet Union in 1982. Samantha Smith, a fifth grader from Manchester, Maine, wrote a letter to the Kremlin asking the Soviet leader if he was going to start a war. When Pravda, the biggest Soviet newspaper, published her letter—and Samantha received an unprecedented invitation to visit the Soviet Union—her family embarked on a historic journey that helped transform the hearts and minds of two nations on a collision course.