Joe Starita

Associate Professor of News-Editorial

Contact:
239 Andersen
402.472.8280
jstarita2@unl.edu

Bio
Joe Starita is an associate professor in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications. For the past seven years, he has taught many of the college's depth reporting classes - classes designed to give students the skills to probe deeply into a focused topic while also providing some international reporting opportunities. To that end, he has taken groups of students to Cuba, France and Sri Lanka. Closer to home, he currently is co-teaching a depth reporting class that will exhaustively examine the pros and cons of using corn-based ethanol to help wean the nation off of Mideast oil.

Before joining the journalism faculty in 2000, Starita spent 13 years at the Miami Herald, where he served as the paper's New York bureau chief from 1983-1987. He also spent four years on the Herald's Investigations Team, where he specialized in stories exposing unethical doctors and lawyers. One of those stories, an article examining how impoverished and illiterate Haitians were being used to extort insurance companies into settling bogus auto claims, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in local reporting.

Interested in American Indian history and culture since his youth, Starita returned to his native Nebraska in 1992 and began work on a three-year book project about five generations of an Indian family. "The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge - A Lakota Odyssey" - was published in 1995 by G.P. Putnam and Sons in New York, has been translated into six foreign languages and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Starita recently finished another book on the life and death of Standing Bear, the Ponca chief who, in 1879, unwittingly ended up in the crosshairs of a landmark legal case. That book is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2008.

Curriculum vitae available upon request.