Ezra Stiles Master’s Tea
About David González
David Gonzalez is co-editor of the New York Times Lens blog and does the biweekly “Side Street” photo-essay feature for the paper’s Metro Section.
Since arriving at the Times in 1990 from Newsweek Magazine – where he had been a national correspondent in Detroit and Miami - he has been the Times’ Bronx Bureau Chief, Religion writer, About New York columnist and the Central America/Caribbean Bureau Chief. More recently, he wrote the biweekly “Citywide” feature column, as well as having published a year-long look at the life of an undocumented family in New York City. As a long-time member of the Metro desk of The New York Times, his work has often focused on the city’s neighborhoods and how they reflect the larger social and cultural issues in American society.
As Central America/Caribbean Bureau Chief, he reported often from Cuba, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. Among his stories were in-depth reports on overdevelopment in Central American cities, AIDS in the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s ongoing political and social crises and the fight against impunity in post-war Guatemala.
On the Lens blog, he has highlighted the work of Latino and Latin American photographers like Pablo Delano, Daniel Hernandez-Salazar and Frank Espada, as well as featuring up and coming photojournalists here and abroad.
In more recent years, he has returned to his photographic roots as a founding member of Los Seis del Sur, a collective of Nuyorican photographers who documented the South Bronx in the 1980s. The group had a highly successful exhibit at the Bronx Documentary Center in January of 2013, accompanied by several panels on issues ranging from the borough’s legacy of social activism to the role of the arts in the community. The show is set to travel in the coming months.
His prizes include a 2008 Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors for “House Afire,” a groundbreaking three-part series on the life of a struggling Pentecostal storefront church, which was accompanied by an online component that marked the Times’ first foray into bilingual multimedia. His feature writing has been honored twice by Columbia University’s Workshops on Race and Ethnicity. He also was awarded Columbia University’s Mike Berger Award in May 1992 for his coverage of New York City and its neighborhoods. In addition to having won numerous Publisher’s Awards, he has been named a Senior Writer at the paper.
In 2013, he was inducted into the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Hal of Fame. His and his colleagues on the Lens Blog were also honored that year by the Griffin (Mass.) Museum of Photography for their contributions to advancing the field of photography.
Before entering journalism, he worked for several non-profit agencies active in New York City’s Latino and African-American communities. He was also the project coordinator at En Foco, a Bronx-based arts group which supports emerging Latino photographers.
Mr. Gonzalez was born and raised in the Bronx, where he attended Cardinal Hayes High School. He earned a BA from Yale in 1979 and a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University. He lives in the Bronx with his wife, Elena Carbal, and their children, Sebastian and Paloma.
Photo Credit – Earl Wilson