Deborah S. Sontag

Deborah Sontag is a Brooklyn-based writer with 35 years of experience as an investigative reporter, foreign correspondent, magazine writer and editor. She spent most of her career at The New York Times, where she reported from around the city, the country and the world.

Sontag created the immigration beat at The Times, served as the first woman bureau chief in Jerusalem, and, with an award-winning, 18,000-word narrative on waste and bungling in the reconstruction of Ground Zero, helped pioneer the use of stand-alone sections devoted to a single story.

She has profiled world leaders from Hugo Chávez to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and covered a broad range of subjects, which recently included Colombian death squads, Salvadoran street gangs, transgender inmates, the North Dakota oil boom and addiction treatment in Appalachia.

Among her many commendations, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her coverage of the 2010 Haitian earthquake, and a winner of the George Polk Award for an investigation of the federal immigration agency.

Prior to joining The Times, Sontag was a feature writer and book critic at The Miami Herald, and an education reporter at The Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette. She has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and a high school French and Spanish teacher in Manhattan.

She holds an M.S. degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a B.A. in Romance Languages and Literature from Dartmouth College.