UMD alum wins Pulitzer Prize

Cheryl Diaz Meyer

Photo by Brett Groehler

By Rick Moore

Her heartbreaking and thought-provoking photos captured the realities of the war in Iraq last spring--images like a child being comforted by his father as hospital staff cleaned his shrapnel wounds, or a Marine resting in the shade beneath an amphibious assault vehicle.

Cheryl Diaz Meyer, a University of Minnesota, Duluth, alum and senior staff photographer for the Dallas Morning News newspaper, has been awarded the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in the category of breaking-news photography for her documentation of the war in Iraq.

Embedded with the Marines Second Tank Battalion, Diaz Meyer took to the battlefields of Iraq for nearly two months as one of the few female journalists near the front lines. Her photographs revealed a firsthand account of the war and its effects. When asked about her efforts on the battlefield Diaz Meyer said, "Really, in my mind, I just wanted to cover the war as best as I knew how."

For Diaz Meyer, covering the war also included recording a journal that she published online. The following excerpts are from that journal.

April 5, 2003

A sickening WVOOOOOM! accompanied by a desperate call of INCOMING!!! woke me up from my hard won, battle-weary sleep. Tanks barreled up and down the dusty streets, artillery exploding in every direction with the cries of grown men injured in the fighting.

In a fraction of a second, my poor, numb brain registered the sound of a 122 mm. rocket that landed only 20 feet from our camp and I thought, where do you get off lighting those things up so close to sleeping souls??? We were lined up in our sleeping sacks like mummies trying to erase the horror of the day's battles that left three of our guys dead and another nine injured when the explosion awoke us, terror beating deep in our throats.

April 13, 2003

In the early morning blue light in the midst of green and khaki camouflage, I saw a young grunt with rosy cheeks resting on the ground on his elbows holding a rose to his nose, inhaling its delicate scent. I grabbed my camera and quietly began shooting pictures. He was not a boy and not yet a man. With green knit gloves, finger tips cut off, one pinky high in the air, grime embedded in every crevice of his hands, he raised the rose, and into my frame appeared another Marine infantryman who bent down to share a deep breath of the flower's perfume. I snapped several more frames, delighted to be a witness to this moment of gentleness.

In addition to her work in Iraq, Diaz Meyer has also been on assignments in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Guatemala. She graduated from UMD in 1991 with a B.A. in German and from Western Kentucky in 1994 with a degree in journalism.

To see some of Cheryl Diaz Meyer's photographs from Iraq and read journal entries, visit http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0305/cd_intro.html.

This story contains information from UMD Public Relations.