S. Lynne Walker

S. Lynne Walker is a Pulitzer Prize finalist whose reporting has taken her to Mexico, where she lived for 16 years covering political, economic and social issues affecting U.S.-Mexico relations.

Walker began her journalism career at the age of 18 when she got her first newspaper job at The Honolulu Advertiser.  After graduating from the University of Hawaii, she worked at newspapers in Tampa, Sacramento and San Diego. It was at The San Diego Union-Tribune, while covering California’s agricultural industry for the business section, that Walker became interested in Mexico coverage.

From 1992-2008, Walker served as Mexico City Bureau Chief for San Diego, Calif.-based Copley News Service. Her coverage took her to remote corners of Mexico: to Chiapas, where she rented a plane to fly into Zapatista-held territory, and to a remote village in the mountains of Oaxaca where she traveled on horseback to report on rural poverty.

In 2004, Walker was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for “Beardstown: Reflection of a Changing America,” her four-part series on a small Illinois town that was transformed by immigration. That same year, she received the American Society of News Editors’ Diversity Award. In 2005, Walker received the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for outstanding coverage of Latin America.

Before joining InquireFirst, Walker served for eight years as vice president of the Institute of the Americas, a nonprofit organization on the University of California, San Diego, campus.  There, she established the Institute’s regional journalism program, creating an international network of journalists and raising funds to provide them with scholarships to attend weeklong journalism workshops that she organized and directed.

As Executive Director of InquireFirst, Walker continues to travel to Latin America to work with colleagues on new ways to produce in-depth reporting in science, health and the environment and to broaden their audiences with digital reporting. She has conducted Spanish-language journalism workshops in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina.