Washington Post correspondent and UC Santa Cruz alumnus Nick Miroff has been awarded a 2017 Maria Moors Cabot Prize for his reporting in Latin America.
Presented by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, the Cabot Prizes honor career excellence and coverage of the Western Hemisphere that furthers inter-American understanding.
Established in 1938, they are the oldest international awards in the field of journalism.
Miroff writes for the Washington Post about Latin American politics and foreign relations, covering a beat that includes Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.
He graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 2000, where he studied Spanish and Latin American literature. Miroff went on to earn a masters degree from the UC Berkeley School of Journalism in 2006.
In 2014, he returned to UC Santa Cruz as a guest for the Creative Writing Program’s Living Writers Series. Miroff participated in a panel of fellow alumni journalists that included Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter, Martha Mendoza, and Time magazine's Washington D.C. Bureau Chief, Michael Scherer.
“Nick Miroff’s lively and eloquent stories show how people in Latin America are being buffeted by violence and political change,” noted the Columbia announcement of Miroff’s Cabot award.
“In the Amazon lowlands of Ecuador, he revealed how the construction of an oil pipeline fueled deadly rivalries among indigenous tribes. In northern Mexico he observed, through the eyes of an American priest, the ravages in rural villages caught between feuding drug cartels. His prescient reporting foretold the rush of migrants from Central America to the United States and the rising death toll in illegal border crossings."
"More recently, he followed guerrillas in Colombia emerging after decades in the jungle to an unfamiliar condition called peace.”
