Journalism wasn\u2019t Jacqui Banaszynski\u2019s first career choice. She had aspirations to be an athlete, but grew up before Title IX gave girls equal access to the field. She dreamed of being a commercial airline pilot or astronaut, but was handicapped by height and gender. She probably should have been an architect, but in her rural school district in the 1960s, girls weren\u2019t allowed into shop class where she would have learned drafting. So she joined the high school newspaper staff, got the keys to the school car and went to find stories.<\/p>\n
She spent the next 30 years as a reporter and editor for newspapers in the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest. She has filed stories from all seven continents, including Antarctica. She has covered beauty pageants and popes, AIDS and the Olympics, dogsled expeditions and refugee camps. She came of age in the modern women\u2019s movement, covered some of its crucible events and benefited from the battles fought on behalf of women everywhere.<\/p>\n
She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for an intimate series<\/a> on a gay farm couple dying of AIDS, and was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for her on-the-ground coverage of the famine in sub-Saharan Africa. She now is a Knight Chair professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and an editing fellow at the Poynter Institute. She coaches reporters, writers and editors around the world.<\/p>\n