William Carlsen

William Carlsen has been a journalist for thirty years, a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting and a winner of numerous journalism awards including the Pan American Health Organization’s top award for a series of stories on the origin of the AIDS epidemic. For many years he lived with his wife in Antigua Guatemala where he set out to follow the trail through the Central American jungles of John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, the two protagonists in his book "Jungle of Stone". He currently lives in Sonoma County, California. He can be reached at: carlsen.will@gmail.com. Carlsen graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a master's degree in journalism. He has worked as a reporter for the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle covering major stories including the trial of Patty Hearst, the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the war in Central America, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, and the O.J. Simpson trial. As an investigative reporter, he has written about fraud in Silicon Valley, the breakdown of capital punishment in California, and contamination of California’s water supplies. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series on the disease-spreading dangers of syringe reuse in developing countries and from an epidemic of accidental needle sticks among U.S. health care workers. He has taught at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California in Berkeley and San Francisco State University.