Cordell Hull Lecture - Sonia Nazario

On Thursday, September 16, Cumberland School of Law and Alabama Appleseed will co-host Sonia Nazario, author of the book entitled "Enrique's Journey."  Her presentation and book signing will be held at 6:00 PM in Reid Chapel, Samford University. Prior to the lecture, a panel discussion on immigration issues will be held at 4:00 PM in the Moot Court Room in Robinson Hall followed by a reception in the lobby.

As the legal and political debates over immigration continue, often we miss the point about what drives illegal immigration. Enrique’s Journey tells the story of a Honduran boy’s epic journey to find his mother in the United States. Ms. Nazario’s talk gives a very different perspective about the very challenging immigration issue that our country is facing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sonia Nazario has spent 20 years reporting and writing about social issues, most recently as a projects reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Her stories have tackled some of this country’s most intractable problems: hunger, drug addiction, immigration.

She has won numerous national journalism and book awards. In 2003, her story of a Honduran boy’s struggle to find his mother in the U.S., entitled “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 Assn. of Hispanic Journalists Guillermo Martinez-Marquez Award for Overall Excellence. 

Expanded into a book, Enrique’s Journey became a national bestseller and won two book awards. 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 has been named among the most influential Latinos by Hispanic Business Magazine and a “trendsetter” by Hispanic Magazine.
 
Nazario, who grew up in Kansas and in Argentina, has written extensively from Latin America and about Latinos in the United States. She is now at work on her second book. She began her career at the Wall Street Journal, where she reported from four bureaus: New York, Atlanta, Miami, and Los Angeles. In 1993, she joined the Los Angeles Times. She serves on the advisory boards of the University of North Texas Mayborn Literary Non-fiction Writer's Conference and of Catch the Next, a non-profit working to double the number of Latinos enrolling in college. She is also on the board of Kids In Need of Defense, a non-profit launched by Microsoft and Angelina Jolie to provide pro-bono attorneys to unaccompanied immigrant children. 

She is a graduate of Williams College and has a master’s degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, Nazario received an honorary doctorate from Mount