Julia Preston
Monday, February 6, 2017
Topic: Immigration and the US-Mexico Partnership
Julia Preston was a member of The New York Times staff that won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on international affairs for its series that profiled the corrosive effects of drug corruption in Mexico.
Ms. Preston became a national correspondent covering immigration for The Times in April 2006. She was a federal courts reporter from May 2004 to March 2006. Previously she was deputy investigations editor from March 2003 to April 2004. Prior to that, she had been United Nations bureau chief from October 2002 to February 2003, covering the Security Council deliberations on Iraq. From January to September 2002, Ms. Preston was an editor on the Foreign Desk in New York. From September 1995 to December 2001, she was a New York Times correspondent in Mexico.
Ms. Preston came to The Times in July 1995 after working at the Washington Post for nine years as a foreign correspondent. She is a 1997 recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for distinguished coverage of Latin America and a 1994 winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Humanitarian Journalism.
She covered the United Nations for The Post from January 1993 to May 1995, a period that included crises in Bosnia, Somalia, North Korea, Rwanda and Iraq. She was a Post Latin America correspondent based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 1990 to 1992, covering the impeachment of President Fernando Collor de Mello.
Previously Ms. Preston was the Washington Post bureau chief in Miami from 1986 to 1989, covering wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala and the conflict between the United States and Panamanian general Manuel Antonio Noriega, as well as Cuba and Haiti. Before that Ms. Preston had worked for The Boston Globe and National Public Radio.
Ms. Preston is the author, with Samuel Dillon, of Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), which recounts Mexico’s transformation over three decades from an authoritarian state into a democracy.
Born in Lake Forest, Ill., on May 29, 1951, Ms. Preston received a B.A. degree in Latin American Studies from Yale University in 1976. She speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese. She has one daughter.