Sonia Nazario

“Enrique's Journey & America's Immigration Dilemma“

Monday, January 23, 2012 at 7:00 p.m. in the College Theatre

Sonia Nazario has spent 20 years reporting and writing about social issues, most recently as a projects reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Her stories have tackled some of our country’s most intractable problems: hunger, drug addiction and immigration. In 1998, Nazario was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series on children of drug-addicted parents. In 1994, she won a George Polk Award for Local Reporting for a series about hunger among school children in California.

In 2003, Nazario’s column Enrique’s Journey, the story of a Honduran boy’s struggle to find his mother in the United States, won more than a dozen awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, the George Polk Award for International Reporting, the Grand Prize of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Guillermo Martinez-Marquez Award for Overall Excellence.

Expanded into a book, Enrique’s Journey became a national bestseller, won two awards, and is required reading for all incoming freshmen at 24 universities and dozens of high schools across the country. It has been selected as a “One City, One Book” read by five cities and is being made into a movie by Lifetime.