Jacqueline Charles
Jacqueline Charles is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Emmy Award-winning Caribbean Correspondent at the Miami Herald. She began her journalism career at the Herald as a 14-year-old high school intern before graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Jacqueline’s assignments have taken her throughout the Caribbean as well as Liberia, Kenya, Italy, and most recently Mexico, Canada and Chile to report on the plight of Haitian migrants. Jacqueline is a founding member of the Carolina Association of Black Journalists, a college-affiliated chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). She is also a past president and scholarship chairwoman of the South Florida Association of Black Journalists and a longtime assistant director of the University of Miami/Dow Jones High School Journalism Workshop.
The first to tell the world that Haitian President René Préval had survived the devastating Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, she spent 18 months living in Haiti as part of the Miami Herald's commitment to have a body stationed full-time following the tragedy. That commitment including not just breaking news on the election, post-quake reconstruction and cholera epidemic, but a newspaper first—a documentary on Haiti, titled 'NouBouke' ("We are fed up"). Jacqueline served as co-producer on the Emmy-winning film, which was broadcast in more than 50 PBS markets in the United States.
Her numerous other awards include NABJ Journalist of the Year for her Haiti earthquake coverage and a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist for that same coverage. She was also recognized for her contributions to the Miami Herald's Panama Papers investigation, which was awarded a 2017 Pulitzer Prize. In 2018, she was awarded the Maria Moors Cabot Award, the oldest prize in journalism and the most prestigious for coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Her Pulitzer Center-financed reporting series, "Cancer in Haiti," in 2018, also was the recipient of numerous awards including the The AACR June L. Biedler Prize for Cancer Journalism.
Jacqueline is a longtime member of NABJ and currently serves as a member of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill's Journalism and Mass Communication Board of Advisers. In 2015 she was recognized by UNC as a Distinguished Alumni.