MIRTA OJITO

Mirta Ojito is an award-winning journalist and author who began her career in South Florida at The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald after earning a bachelor's degree in communication from Florida Atlantic University in 1986.

Ms.Ojito joined the staff of The New York Times in 1996; she was a member of the Times' reporting team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for national reporting with a series titled "How Race is Lived in America." In 1999, she won a Distinguished Writing Award for foreign reporting from the American Society of Newspaper Editors for a series of stories about life in Cuba, her childhood home, which she had left at the age of 16 during the 1980 Mariel boatlift. Her first book, Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus, was published in 2005 by The Penguin Press.

Ms. Ojito's work has been included in several anthologies, including To Mend the World: Women Reflect on 9/11 (White Pine Press, 2002), Written into History: Pulitzer Prize Reporting of the Twentieth Century from The New York Times (Henry Holt and Co., 2001), By Heart/De Memoria (Temple University Press, 2003) How Race is Lived in America (Times Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2001), and The Authentic Voice: The Best Reporting on Race and Ethnicity (Columbia University Press, 2006).

Ms. Ojito, who earned her master's degree in journalism from Columbia University, has taught journalism at New York University, Columbia University and the University of Miami. In January of 2006, she joined the full-time faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University as an assistant professor.

Top Story

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

Will Boehner plunge into immigration reform?

House Speaker John Boehner at a briefing before the Senate voted on the immigration overhaul bill.

When I was a child and didn’t know how to hold my breath under water, I was afraid to go swimming in the deep end of the pool. My father taught me to pinch my nose and dive in. To this day, that’s the mental image I use to overcome my fears, in and out of the water.

SENATE DEBATE

Words matter in immigration debate

Somewhere in Douglas, Ga., or in Kendall, Ill., or in Luzerne, Pa. — anywhere that Hispanics are a growing presence but not a majority —a child is wondering, who are these people in the news who are causing such a commotion? I’m referring, of course, to undocumented immigrants, or, as the child of my hypothetical is likely to hear, “illegal” immigrants, maybe even aliens.
CUBA

Chipping away at Cuba’s totalitarian state

These days it is really hard to know whether to feel optimistic or pessimistic about Cuba. And that’s a good thing.
IMMIGRATION REFORM

Immigration reform: Repairing a broken system

The Center for Immigration Studies — a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank devoted to the impact of immigration on the United States — sent an e-mail blast last week asking their supporters for donations “to preserve the rule of law.”
ELIÉCER ÁVILA

Cuban Eliécer Ávila asks tough questions that scare regime

Eliécer Ávila is up with the roosters every morning, shoveling pig manure in the modest farm in the province of Las Tunas, Cuba, where this graduate of the country’s only computer science university raises pigs for a living. He sold nine in late January just before he left the island for the first time to visit friends in Sweden.
YOANI SANCHEZ

OTHER VIEWS: Blogger Yoani Sánchez’s shield in Cuba: hidden technology

She is small and slight, but I expected that.