Nazario was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series on children of drug addicted parents. of Hispanic Journalists Guillermo Martinez-Márquez Award for Overall Excellence. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the National Assn. 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. She began her career at the Wall Street Journal, and later joined the Los Angeles Times. She has honorary doctorates from Mount St. In 2012 Columbia Journalism Review named Nazario among “40 women who changed the media business in the past 40.” In 2020, Parade Magazine named Nazario one of “50+ Most Influential Latin-American Women in History.” She is a graduate of Williams College and has a master’s degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She 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. In 2018, she was given the Spirit of HOPE Award. In 2016 the American Immigration Council gave her the American Heritage Award and the Houston Peace & Justice Center honored her with their National Peacemaker Award. In 2015, her humanitarian efforts led to her selection as the Don and Arvonne Fraser Human Rights Award recipient by the Advocates for Human Rights, the Champion of Children by First Focus and a Golden Door award winner by HIAS Pennsylvania. She has also spent the past decade recruiting attorneys to provide pro-bono asylum representation to unaccompanied minors.
General Assembly, and gave many interviews to national media, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, NBC's Meet the Press, Anderson Cooper 360, and Al Punto with Jorge Ramos. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the U.N. After the piece was published, she addressed the U.S. When a national crisis erupted in 2014 over the detention of unaccompanied immigrant children at the border, Nazario returned to Honduras to report an article in The New York Times that detailed the violence causing the exodus and argued that it is a refugee crisis, not an immigration crisis. A young adult version of Enrique's Journey was published in 2013 aimed at middle schoolers. It was turned into a book by Random House that became a national bestseller, a freshman read at 100 universities, and required reading at hundreds of high schools across the country.
Published as a series in the Los Angeles Times, Enrique's Journey won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2003. She is best known for Enrique's Journey, her story of a Honduran boy’s struggle to find his mother in the U.S. A fluent Spanish speaker of Jewish ancestry whose personal history includes living in Argentina during the so-called dirty war, Nazario spent decades reporting and writing about social issues for U.S. She was also a finalist for a third Pulitzer, in Public Service. Sonia Nazario is an award-winning journalist whose stories have tackled some of this country’s most intractable issues - hunger, drug addiction, immigration - and have won some of the most prestigious journalism and book awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes.