Mark Curnutte

Mark Curnutte's "A Promise in Haiti: A Reporter's Notes on Families and Daily Lives," is a Silver Level winner in ForeWord Reviews' Book of the Year Awards 2011 in the social sciences category. Curnutte, social justice and minority affairs reporter with the Cincinnati Enquirer, returned to Haiti for a fifth time in July 2013 on a Ford Foundation social justice reporting grant through the International Center for Journalists, Washington, D.C. He revisited the three families in his book and investigated at close range two examples of contemporary slavery: restavek child domestic servants in Haiti and the living and working conditions for undocumented Haitian cane cutters in the neighboring Dominican Republic and plight of their stateless children.

The newspaper's former NFL writer, Curnutte's newspaper work takes him to shelters, talking with homeless families or teens; federal detention centers, interviewing undocumented immigrants; or the homes of families with sons on death row. His desire to listen to the marginalized has taken him several times to Haiti, where in Gonaives he established a working relationship with three impoverished families. The result is "A Promise in Haiti"(2011), Vanderbilt University Press. It includes 55 photographs by the author, patterned after the work of Walker Evans in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." An Illinois native and 29-year newspaper reporter and editor, Curnutte previously worked at the "News & Observer" in Raleigh, N.C. He is a 1984 graduate of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.