Julia Preston

Position
Visiting Research Scholar and Visiting Lecturer, Program in Latin American Studies (Spring 2020)
Bio/Description

JULIA PRESTON (B.A., Yale University). Preston is a contributing writer, covering immigration, at the Marshall Project, a non-profit journalism organization focusing on the justice system. Prior to the Marshall Project, Preston worked for 21 years at the New York Times. She was the national correspondent covering immigration for the Times from April 2006 until her retirement in December 2016. Among other assignments, she was a Times correspondent in Mexico from September 1995 to December 2001. 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. 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. Before joining the Times in July 1995, Preston worked at the Washington Post for nine years as a foreign correspondent. She was the 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.  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 struggling democracy. In the spring of 2011 and the spring of 2020, Preston was a visiting lecturer in the Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS), teaching a seminar combining study of immigration issues with instruction on journalism writing.