While in high school our daughter Leigh Munsil had an opportunity to do relief work in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.
She came back and wrote about it, and the response to her writing confirmed her desire to be a journalist. She realized that stories of real people needed to be told, accurately and compassionately, and that she wanted to write those stories.
Today The Dallas Morning News publishes on its front-page a series of stories following up on its Pulitzer Prize winning Katrina photos — and the team that put the stories together was led by Leigh Munsil:
The newspaper’s editor wrote the introduction:
As part of our Hurricane Katrina five-year anniversary coverage at The Dallas Morning News, we revisited several of the people we had photographed after the storm hit in 2005.
Staff photographers Tom Fox and Irwin Thompson did the photography and video for the package Faces of Katrina, which included several photos from our 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.
DMN staff writer Leigh Munsil wrote the following introduction for the photo package, which will be published in the Saturday edition of The Dallas Morning News, on the eve of the date the Hurricane hit five years ago. Many thanks to Leigh and her team, along with DMN senior research librarian Angelica Cortez, for helping us track down the people in these photographs.