Diane Sawyer secures first sit-down interview with Gabrielle Giffords

Gabrielle Giffords has made a handful of public appearances since being shot in the head in January during the tragic shooting in Tucson, Arizona--including an emotional one at the debt vote on Capitol Hill in August--but the Arizona congresswoman has yet to do a formal television interview.

ABC announced on Monday that Diane Sawyer has secured the first TV interview with Giffords and her astronaut husband, Mark Kelly. The interview is scheduled to air in a primetime special on Monday, Nov. 14--the day before Kelly and Giffords' memoir, "Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope," is slated to be published.

A spokesman for ABC told The Cutline that the network--which in the past has been criticized for the practice of licensing photo rights in exchange for exclusive interviews--did not pay to land the exclusive with Giffords.

And while a portion of the proceeds from the memoir--co-written by Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow--will go to selected Arizona charities, the ABC spokesman said the network did not make a donation as part of its booking.

For Sawyer, the interview is the latest in a string of big "gets" in 2011. In January, Sawyer landed the first interview with Donald Rumsfeld since leaving the Bush administration; in July 2011, Sawyer sat down with kidnapping victim Jaycee Dugard, another exclusive; and on Tuesday, Sawyer will host an ABC special on the audio recordings of interviews with former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy.