Diana Dawson

Lecturer

Contact Information:
512-282-0256
dianadawson@austin.rr.com

Diana Dawson worked as a reporter in newsrooms nationwide for 17 years. During that time, she wrote investigative pieces about teachers' sexual misconduct with their students, breakdowns in state mental health systems and how foster care abused its charges. As her specialty developed in social issues coverage, she wrote magazine-style stories about life in a burn center, an old farmer battling his wife's Alzheimer's disease and an Indian tribe's quest to defeat poverty with education.

Over the years, her work won scores of national, regional and local awards, including making her a finalist as part of a newsroom team for the Pulitzer Prize, the finalist for the Ernie Pyle Award, the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University and finalist twice for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists.

Dawson also wrote a nationally syndicated column about family television for 10 years that appeared weekly in more than 70 newspapers. She freelances as a writing consultant for corporations, a writing coach for newsrooms and a writer for many publications including a stint as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times travel section. She has presented her seminar on managing long-term stories for several of the Poynter Institute's National Writers' Workshops and for other journalism groups in the U.S. and Canada.

She has been a School of Journalism lecturer for more than 10 years, has served as course coordinator for J315 and as editor of the Texas Journalist. She founded and coordinates an annual writing conference for more than 450 elementary school children, which allows them to work for a day with journalists, poets, playwrights, screenwriters, songwriters and novelists.

Dawson earned her B.J. from the University of Missouri at Columbia in 1980. She is married to Osler McCarthy. They have two children, Gabe and Grace.

Recent Courses: J315 News Media Writing and Editing, J327 Feature Writing.