Ingram Lecture Series Presents
Diana K. Sugg

October 25, 2009
at 7:30 p.m.
Moore Hall Auditorium

Diana K. Sugg is a veteran newspaper reporter who worked her way up from writing radio copy at 2 a.m. for the Associated Press to winning the Pulitzer Prize. Along the way, she chased after musician James Brown in South Carolina, got to triple murders before the police in California, and tried to figure out health care reform.

As a medical reporter at The Baltimore Sun for 10 years, she covered a range of breaking news, enterprise and features. She won the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting in 2003 for a collection of stories that delved into the primitive nature of modern medicine. By taking on taboo topics and getting inside some of the most intimate moments in health care, she gave readers a clear-eyed look at how far medical science still needs to go in areas including sepsis, stillbirths and the too-routine task of how physicians break news of death.

For another major project, “If I Die,” Sugg worked for two years to get inside the secret world of dying children to document the terrible dilemmas faced by children, parents and caregivers.

A native of Rockville, Md., Sugg learned journalism editing her college newspaper and writing for $5 an inch for a community weekly. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Villanova University, she landed her first job in the Philadelphia bureau of the Associated Press, and then moved to cover general assignment and crime at The Spartanburg Herald-Journal in South Carolina. She was police reporter and later health reporter at The Sacramento Bee, where she won national awards for both. She earned her M.A. degree in journalism on a Kiplinger Public Affairs Reporting Fellowship at Ohio State University.

She has been guest faculty at the Poynter Institute and the American Press Institute, as well as a speaker at several National Writers’ Workshops and the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism at Harvard University. Her work has been featured in journalism textbooks. Sugg has also served as a Pulitzer juror and a member of the Poynter Institute's National Advisory Board.

In the last few years, she lived in Geneva, Switzerland with her husband and two young sons. She recently moved back to the United States and plans to do freelance journalism and teaching.

Her father, Phillip S. Sugg, is a native of Goodwater, Alabama and graduated from Auburn University with a degree in engineering in 1957. Her grandmother, Ethel Sugg, earned her Master’s degree in education at Auburn and worked there for many years, in positions including head of housing and assistant to the dean of women.