Meeting Speaker for Monday, October 28, 2013

Stephen Magagnini’s the son of an Italian immigrant and a Jewish American whose parents came to Ellis Island from Lithuania and Ukraine. His parents were not allowed to marry in 1954 Italy because his mom was Jewish, so they built a life prizing diversity in Brooklyn, NY, while his MD dad made house calls from Harlem to the Bronx.

Magagnini has covered ethnic affairs and race relations for The Sacramento Bee since 1994. His projects, "Orphans of History" (about Hmong refugees) and "Mending The Past"(on reparations) appear in the anthologies, Best Newspaper Writing 2001 and 2002. In 2001, "Orphans of History" won an ASNE Distinguished Writing award, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism gave Magagnini a Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding coverage of race and ethnicity in America. He also has been honored for his coverage of South Africa's free elections in 1994, American Muslim affairs, the tragic modern history of California Indians, Indian sovereignty, the impact of immigrants on Sacramento, and a CIA front in Honolulu that bilked investors out of $20 million. He was one of the first western reporters to write about China’s Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, and has reported from China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, the Philippines, Italy, Mexico, Russia and Ukraine.

Before coming to The Bee as a Sunday Magazine Writer in November 1985, he covered breaking news and investigations for The San Francisco Chronicle. A fellowship junkie, Magagnini has been a Freedom Forum Fellow and a Jefferson Fellow in Asian Studies, and in 2002 completed a Stanford Knight fellowship. He also has taught journalism to college students at UC Davis since 2000, and has mentored many professional journalists through the Racial Justice and Health Journalism fellowships at USC.

While reporting Sea of Change, Magagnini was stricken with a brain tumor and had 14 hours of surgery at Stanford Medical Center in Nov. 2005. Thanks to the prayers of people of all races and faiths and great surgeons, he enjoyed a full recovery and went on to complete the series. A graduate of Brooklyn Friends School and Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., he still shoots hoops, mostly with his 11-year-old son Marco. Once, for a San Francisco Chronicle story, he played the Harlem Globetrotters. They held him scoreless.