Emily Wax
Adjunct Lecturer
Emily Wax worked at The Washington Post for 27 years and was an award-winning foreign correspondent in Africa and India. She was drawn to stories of how ordinary people struggled to live their daily lives. She profiled college students struggling to stay alive amid Congo’s civil war, and the use of rape as a weapon in Sudan’s war in the Darfur region.
She was named the 2004 winner of the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for outstanding reporting “on the systematic violence threatening millions of people in the Darfur region of Sudan.”
Perhaps more important than awards, her stories on serial rape in Congo prompted a special hospital wing to be opened, and her narratives about the children of parents with AIDS led readers to fund the establishment of an orphanage in Kenya. A foundation, Girls Gotta Run, was inspired by her stories about female runners in Ethiopia. For the last decade, she reported breaking news and did larger narratives about the impact of conflict on veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
She also covered breaking state and federal court cases on the rollback of abortion and transgender rights along with covering countless hurricanes, mass shootings and wildfires.
She became a Story Fellow, writing long form pieces on new and successful approaches to hospice and end-of-life care, which could become models for families struggling through one of the most painful and understudied/taboo periods in American life.
She was named the 2004 winner of the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for outstanding reporting “on the systematic violence threatening millions of people in the Darfur region of Sudan.”
Perhaps more important than awards, her stories on serial rape in Congo prompted a special hospital wing to be opened, and her narratives about the children of parents with AIDS led readers to fund the establishment of an orphanage in Kenya. A foundation, Girls Gotta Run, was inspired by her stories about female runners in Ethiopia. For the last decade, she reported breaking news and did larger narratives about the impact of conflict on veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
She also covered breaking state and federal court cases on the rollback of abortion and transgender rights along with covering countless hurricanes, mass shootings and wildfires.
She became a Story Fellow, writing long form pieces on new and successful approaches to hospice and end-of-life care, which could become models for families struggling through one of the most painful and understudied/taboo periods in American life.