Miriam Pawel is the author of The Browns of California, winner of the California Book Award Gold Medal; The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and The Union of Their Dreams. A Pulitzer Prize–winning editor and reporter, she spent twenty-five years at Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. For this book, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship and was named a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She lives in Southern California.