Fall Convocation
Paul Cuadros
Paul Cuadros is the author of A Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America.
The book by award-winning investigative reporter Paul Cuadros follows the lives of members of a Latino soccer team in Siler City. As the young students struggle to achieve academic and athletic success, the town must contend with its attitudes and perceptions of Latino immigrants.
Cuadros coached the team, which won North Carolina’s state soccer championship in 2004.
Cuadros has written about issues of race and poverty for more than 15 years. He worked for The Chicago Reporter, where he won several awards for his reporting on housing, health care for the poor, and immigration issues. While working for the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., he helped write the books “The Buying of the Congress” and “The Cheating of America, How the Rich Cheat on their Taxes.”
In 1999, Cuadros won an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship and moved to Pittsboro to write about the impact of the large numbers of Latino poultry workers in rural towns in the South.
Following his fellowship, Cuadros joined TIME magazine as a freelance reporter. In 2002, he won the National Association of Hispanic Journalist’s online award for his special series for Time.com on an unaccompanied minor who had crossed the U.S. and Mexico border and had been detained by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for more than a year. The series helped to get the minor released from detention.
Cuadros also was a member of a team of radio journalists from North Carolina Public Radio WUNC-FM that won the Alfred I. duPont Columbia Journalism Award in 2005 for the series “Understanding Poverty.”
He has received the Inland Press Association Award sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Pew Charitable Trust Award for health care reporting and the National Association of Hispanic Journalist award for on-line reporting.
Cuadros is a freelance writer for TIME, and he continues to write and track the lives of the high school players as they grow up and enter the greater society. He is currently working on a new project involving Latinos in the South and the justice system.
He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Information from Summer Reading Program
