Richard Read ’75

Richard Read got his start in journalism working on The Centipede deep in the last century when CA’s student newspaper was edited in the Jabberwocky, a campus cottage, and laid out at an Acton printing plant. After graduating from Amherst College, Rich stuck with newspapers for 40 years, reporting from more than 60 countries on all seven continents. He won two Pulitzer Prizes — one for explaining Asia’s 1990s financial crisis by following a container of french fries from a Northwest farm to a Singapore McDonald’s, and the other for exposing abuses by U.S. immigration officials. As a Tokyo-based foreign correspondent, he reported from North Korea, covered the war in Cambodia, and chronicled the economic opening of Russia and Vietnam. As Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Seattle, he broke the story of a super-spreading event among choral singers that helped convince health officials that COVID spread through the air. Rich retired in 2021 and continues freelancing from Seattle and working in documentary film.