Susan Chira
Foreign Editor, The New York Times

Susan Chira was named foreign editor of The New York Times in January 2004, during a critical time in our nation's history. The United States was nearly three years into the Afghanistan War and former President George W. Bush declared war on Iraq less than a year before Chira's appointment.
 
Chira shapes how The New York Times covers the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, two of the most dangerous locales for foreign and local correspondents in the history of war coverage. She is also responsible for overseeing reporting on a wide range of topics in the 25 foreign bureaus the Times maintains around the world. Under her leadership, the Times was awarded Pulitzer Prizes in 2009 and 2007 for International Reporting, as well as many other awards.
 

Because of Chira's achievements and direction at the Times, she will be honored with a 2010 Matrix Award.
 
Chira has successfully moved up the ranks at the Times in the 28 years she has been on staff. Before her appointment as foreign editor, she was editorial director of book development, a post she held since September 2002. Before that, she was the editor of the Week in Review section, beginning in October 1999, after serving as deputy foreign editor of the newspaper since February 1997. She previously served in a variety of reporting positions, including national education correspondent, newspaper correspondent in Tokyo from October 1984 until February 1989, metropolitan reporter in the Albany and Stamford bureaus, and reporter for the Business Day section.

She is also the author of "A Mother's Place: Rewriting the Rules of Motherhood," (HarperCollins Canada, 1998), a book that explores the fact that working mothers are good mothers, and that there are many ways to honor your obligations to children as well as strive for personal satisfaction. Chira's book grew out of a series of front-page articles she wrote for the Times.

Chira received a B.A. degree in history and East Asian studies from Harvard University in 1980, graduating summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. As an undergraduate, she was a reporter and later president of The Harvard Crimson.  She studied Japanese for a year and a half at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo and at Middlebury College in Vermont.

She is married to Michael Shapiro, a writer and a professor of journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.  They have two children, a daughter and son.

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