Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist

Program Title: Enrique's Journey

Sonia Nazario, a projects reporter for The Los Angeles Times, has spent more than two decades reporting and writing about social issues, earning her dozens of national awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her series, “Enrique’s Journey,” about the experiences of Latin American children who immigrate to join their parents in the United States. Expanding on the series, Nazario has written the book, *Enrique’s Journey,* fully recounting the unforgettable odyssey of one Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States.

When Enrique is five years old, his mother, Lourdes, too poor to feed her children, leaves Honduras to work in the United States. After eleven years apart, he decides he will go find her. Without money, he makes the dangerous and illegal trek up the length of Mexico the only way he can–clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains, jumping onto and off the moving boxcars they call El Tren de la Muerte–The Train of Death. It is an epic journey, one thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the United States. Ultimately, Enrique’s Journey is the timeless story of families torn apart, the yearning to be together again, and a boy who will risk his life to find the mother he loves.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, the newspaper series won many other awards including, 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. Nazario also was a previous Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series on children of drug addicted parents. And before that, she won a George Polk Award for Local Reporting for a series about hunger among schoolchildren in California.

Nazario, who grew up in Kansas and in Argentina, has written extensively from Latin America and about Latinos in the United States. She began her career at The Wall Street Journal, before joining The Los Angeles Times.