Anthony DePalma

Anthony DePalma was the first foreign correspondent of The New York Times to serve as bureau chief in both Mexico and Canada. Starting in 1993, he covered some of the most tumultuous events in modern Mexican history, including the Zapatista uprising, the assassination of the ruling party's presidential candidate, and the peso crisis that quickly spread economic chaos to markets all over the world. In 1996 he was transferred to the other end of America. 

In Canada, he reported from all ten provinces and three territories, covering natural disasters like the Quebec ice storm and the Red River flood--both once-in-a-century occurrences--the 1997 federal elections that revealed deep regional divisions in Canada, and the historic Indian treaties in British Columbia. In addition, he wrote extensively about the creation of the territory of Nunavut, in which the Inuit people formed their own government. 

Besides North America, Mr. DePalma has reported from Cuba, Guatemala, Suriname, Guyana, and Montenegro, and Albania during the Kosovo crisis. His book "Here: A Biography of the New American Continent" was published in the United States and Canada in 2001. An updated version, with a post 9/11 afterword, was published in 2002. From 2000 to 2002, Mr. DePalma was an international business correspondent for The Times covering North and South America. 

During his tenure with The Times, he also has held positions in the Metropolitan and National sections of the newspaper. Most recently, he wrote about the working class and the environment in New York City. In 2003, he was awarded a fellowship at Notre Dame's Kellogg Institute for International Studies, where he began work on "The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times," which was published in 2006. 

It has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Mr. DePalma has taught graduate seminars at New York University and is an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. In 2007 he was named a Hoover Media Fellow at Stanford University and delivered the annual Jane E. Ruby Lecture at Wheaton College. He was a finalist for a 2007 Emmy for his work on the television documentary "Toxic Legacy." 

In September 2008, Mr. DePalma was named writer-in-residence at Seton Hall University, where he teaches journalism and Latin American issues. In 2009 he delivered the Donald B. Regan Lecture on North America at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis. Later that same year, he received the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for distinguished international journalism from Columbia University. He continues to contribute to The New York Times and is a frequent lecturer on the Americas. 

His latest book, "City of Dust," about the health and environmental aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center, was published in September 2010. The Chicago Sun-Times named it one of the year's best non-fiction books. In May 2020, Mr. DePalma's latest book, "The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times," was published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin/ Random House. 

The culmination of four decades of personal and professional involvement and immersion in Cuba humanizes the millions of ordinary Cubans whose voices have not been heard for 60 years. And without listening to them, there is no way to understand them.