Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Sonia Nazario to present President’s Lecture

Author Sonia Nazario, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Enrique’s Journey,” will present a President’s Lecture in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month at 8 p.m. Sept. 25 in Hudspeth Auditorium, Anderson-Clarke Center.

Sonia Nazario

This is a nonticketed event; however, an RSVP is required. Register by Sept. 24 at https://online.alumni.rice.edu/default.aspx?Page=EVNTEventDetail&EventID=2068.

Nazario has spent more than 20 years reporting and writing about social issues, most recently as a projects reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She has won numerous national journalism and book awards tackling some of this country’s most intractable issues: hunger, drug addiction and immigration.

In 2003, Nazario’s story of a Honduran boy’s struggle to find his mother in the U.S., titled “Enrique’s Journey,” 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 three book awards and became required reading for incoming freshmen at more than 71 colleges and scores of high schools across the U.S.

In 1998, Nazario was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series on children of drug-addicted parents. And in 1994, she won a George Polk Award for Local Reporting for a series about hunger among school children in California.

Nazario, who grew up in Kansas and in Argentina, has been named among the most influential Latinos by Hispanic Business Magazine and a “trendsetter” by Hispanic Magazine. In 2012, the Columbia Journalism Review named Nazario among “40 women who changed the media business in the past 40 years.”

Visit www.enriquesjourney.com to read more about Nazario and the book.

Each year, the President’s Lecture Series brings to the Rice campus a variety of stimulating speakers on a range of topics. Rice is offers the lecture series as a means of enhancing the intellectual life not only of the Rice community, but of its neighbors throughout the city of Houston.

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

For more information, e-mail ricepls@rice.edu or call 713-348-5585.