Investigative Journalism
Susan Ferriss is a veteran journalist currently serving as a senior editor at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, where she selects story pitches seeking grants and provides guidance to reporters worldwide.
Her work at Pulitzer follows a dozen years of award-winning journalism at the Center for Public Integrity, where her investigations into harsh discipline and policing of students led to reforms in Los Angeles and other cities, and new laws in the state of Virginia. During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Susan led a blog, Immigration Decoded, as well as prize-winning reports documenting Homeland Security’s growing power to seize and search people; detention center abuse; family separations; and the pervasive reliance on immigrant labor in Trump-voting communities. Susan is a two-time winner of Columbia University’s Tobenkin Memorial Award for reporting on discrimination. One project, “Throwaway Kids,” exposed how overzealous punishment and neglect were pushing immigrant workers’ kids out of school. The other project, “Hidden Hardship,” mapped the nationwide dependence on foreign-born food workers and chronicled workers’ suffering and hidden deaths during Covid-19.
Early in her career, Susan freelanced in Central America and produced “The Golden Cage,“ a prize-winning documentary about farmworkers in California. At the Monterey Herald newspaper and at the San Francisco Examiner, she covered the immigrant amnesty and the rise and fall of California’s anti-immigrant movement in the 1990s. And in 1997, Harcourt published The Fight in the Fields, a history she co-authored about the farmworkers’ rights movement and Cesar Chavez.
For nearly a decade, she was a Mexico-based staff correspondent for Cox Newspapers, covering a range of news in Latin America, including drug and migrant smuggling and upheaval in Colombia and Venezuela. Her series detailing how Mexico’s free-market economic reforms failed to lift the poorest and stem migration won honors from the Overseas Press Club and the Inter-American Press Association. After a year as a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, Susan went on to cover the immigration reform movement and the impact of the Great Recession for the Sacramento Bee.