Pulitzer Prize-winning Nazario to speak at Rice March 13

Pulitzer Prize-winning Nazario to speak at Rice March 13

FROM RICE NEWS STAFF REPORTS

Award-winning L.A. Times journalist Sonia Nazario has spent more than two decades reporting and writing about social issues, tackling hot-button issues such as hunger, drug addiction and immigration. Next week, she will come to campus as the next speaker in Rice’s President’s Lecture Series.

SONIA NAZARIO

Nazario will present ”Enrique’s Journey: The Odyssey of Immigrants” at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 13, in Grand Hall, Rice Memorial Center.

Nazario won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for her newspaper series on a Honduran boy’s odyssey to reunite with his mother in the United States. She clung to the top of a freight train dubbed ”the train of death” with the young boy, named Enrique, chronicling his journey to find his mother, who was in North Carolina. She later recounted his story in her book ”Enrique’s Journey” and now in an upcoming six-part miniseries for HBO.

In sharing the epic journey that thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the United States, Nazario explored the perils modern day immigrants face. With a reporter’s eye on the truth, she humanized the issue, posing new perspectives that fall on both sides, while offering ways to change the national dialogue on the influx of immigrants and the effects they have on the state of the nation.

Admission to the lecture is free of charge. Seating begins at 7 p.m. Paid visitor parking is available in the Central Campus Garage and in the nearby North Lot. Free parking is available on the west side of campus in the Greenbriar Lot.

For a campus map, visit www.rice.edu/maps/maps.html.

The President’s Lecture Series is sponsored by the Office of the President and is supported by the J. Newton Rayzor Lecture Fund.