Photo by Monica Almeida
Mireya Navarro, known as “Mia” to her friends, is an environmental writer for the New York Times in New York. Before that assignment, she was the West Coast style correspondent for the New York Times, based in Los Angeles, covering lifestyle trends and entertainment.
Mia was born and grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She moved to the states to attend college, earning her B.A. in journalism from George Washington University, in Washington D.C., and her Masters in journalism from Columbia University.
She started her career at the San Francisco Examiner, covering the courts, county government and Bay Area politics, and held foreign assignments in Mexico and Nicaragua. In 1989, after spending a year on a journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan, she joined the New York Times as a staff writer in New York. She worked for the Metropolitan News section and covered AIDS and the prisons.
In 1994, Mia became Miami bureau chief, a five-year assignment that included reporting trips to Central America, Puerto Rico, Cuba and other parts of the Caribbean. She returned to New York in 1999, and was a member of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for the New York Times series “How Race is Lived in America.” The series was later issued as a book.
After 9/11, Mia was part of the team that wrote “Portraits of Grief,” the profiles that documented the lives of those killed in the terrorist attacks. She covered Latin culture and sex-and-relationships for the Culture and Metro sections before moving to Los Angeles in the summer of 2004 for Sunday Styles. During that time she wrote “Green Wedding: Planning Your Eco-friendly Celebration,” published in the Spring of 2009 by Stewart, Tabori & Chang.
Mia has taught journalism as an adjunct professor at Columbia University and as a visiting faculty member for the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in California. She is regularly invited to speak in schools and colleges about her career, and on radio and television about her stories.
Mia lives in New York City with her husband.
