Leon Dash

Leon Dash is the Director of Center for Advanced Study and Swanlund Chair Professor of Journalism, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A former staff reporter for the Washington Post, he has won numerous awards and honors, including the Pulitzer Prize and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award (both for his eight-part Washington Post series that became the basis of Rosa Lee) and the George Polk Memorial Award of the Overseas Press Club.

He is the author of When Children Want Children and the founder of the National Association of Black Journalists. He won an Emmy in 1996 for a documentary based on his Rosa Lee series.