Interviewer: Ross Rojek

Miriam Pawel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent 25 years reporting and editing on both coasts. While a reporter at Newsday, she chronicled the early years of Mario Cuomo’s governorship and presidential ambitions, the state’s troubled prison system, and wasteful spending at public authorities. As an Assistant Managing Editor forNewsday and the Los Angeles Times, she oversaw coverage of thousands of major stories, including the California gubernatorial recall election in 2003, the deadly wildfires that same year, and the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island. Her staffs won journalism’s top honor for coverage of both the wildfires and Flight 800. Returning to reporting in her adopted home of California, she delved into agriculture, one of the state’s largest yet least examined industries, with a four-part series on the United Farm Workers, which led to her book Union of their Dreams.

She left The Times in 2006 to write The Union of Their Dreams, supported in part by a fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation. She traces her passion for piecing together the past back to her undergraduate days at Harvard University, where she majored in Classics. A native of Great Neck, N.Y., she now lives in Pasadena.

Contact author at Miriam Pawel mpawel@unionoftheirdreams.com

Read the review of The Union of Their Dreams.