Shirley Christian
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Shirley Christian is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, known for reporting on the Central American crisis during the 1970s and 1980s.[1] Christian has worked as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, Miami Herald, and Associated Press.[2] Her book on the Nicaraguan Revolution, according to the Wall Street Journal, “may stand as the definitive account of the fall of Anastasio Somoza and the rise of the Sandinistas.”[3]
She is also the author of the 2004 history Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America's Frontier.[4]
Christian graduated from Pittsburg State University in 1960 with a B.A. in language and literature, and from Ohio State University in 1966 with a M.A. in international journalism.[5] She was later selected as a Neiman Fellow at Harvard University.[6]
In 1968, she joined the Associated Press[7] and faced discrimination because of her gender. She writes: “When I arrived in New York at the end of 1968… the foreign editor declared that a woman would go abroad over his dead or retired body. During the coming five years I sat by as my male contemporaries, after a year or two on one of the desks, were dispatched into the wide world.”[8] In 1973, she joined a class action discrimination complaint against the AP.[9] At the time, the news staff was 7% women.[10]
She went on to work as the AP’s United Nations correspondent and as an editor at its Foreign and World Desk before deciding to concentrate her reporting on Latin America.[11] She then became the AP bureau chief for Chile and Bolivia.
