Mark Curnutte
Visiting Instructor
Mark Curnutte is a 1984 Miami University graduate with undergraduate degrees in geography and English. He is a career newspaper journalist who reported extensively on social issues of race, class, poverty, homelessness, and immigration and was three times selected top reporter in Ohio (work produced in 2012, 2013, and 2018). He worked 25 years at the Cincinnati Enquirer and was part of its Pulitzer Prize-winning team for "Seven Days of Heroin" in 2017. He worked in 2015 as a vice president at the Urban League of Greater Southwestern Ohio in Cincinnati, where he was managing editor of the 164-page book "State of Black Cincinnati 2015: Two Cities."
Curnutte joined Miami's Department of Sociology and Gerontology as a Visiting Instructor in August 2019 after working three semesters as an adjunct teaching social justice studies and journalism courses. He is the author of two non-fiction books. Vanderbilt University Press published "A Promise in Haiti: A Reporter's Notes on Families and Daily Lives" in 2011. Winner of a national Foreword Reviews' social sciences book of the year award, "Promise" profiles three families living in abject poverty in the seaside city of Gonaives, Haiti. In 2019, University of Cincinnati published Curnutte's career retrospective, "Across the Color Line: Reporting 25 Years in Black Cincinnati," a collection of 80 in-depth newspaper stories about Cincinnati's stilted race relations, black community history, pressing issues, and personal neighborhood profiles. The anthology is book-ended by original Curnutte essays and features a foreword by the late Nathaniel Jones, retired federal judge and civil rights leader.
In 2013, Curnutte won a competitive Ford Foundation Grant for International Social Justice Reporting and published detailed investigatory stories and accompanying video on childhood slavery in Haiti (restaveks) and the living and working conditions of Haitian migrant cane cutters in the San Pedro de Macoris province -- timed to the release of a US Labor Department report corroborating the abuses of sugar workers throughout the Dominican Republic.
Curnutte joined Miami's Department of Sociology and Gerontology as a Visiting Instructor in August 2019 after working three semesters as an adjunct teaching social justice studies and journalism courses. He is the author of two non-fiction books. Vanderbilt University Press published "A Promise in Haiti: A Reporter's Notes on Families and Daily Lives" in 2011. Winner of a national Foreword Reviews' social sciences book of the year award, "Promise" profiles three families living in abject poverty in the seaside city of Gonaives, Haiti. In 2019, University of Cincinnati published Curnutte's career retrospective, "Across the Color Line: Reporting 25 Years in Black Cincinnati," a collection of 80 in-depth newspaper stories about Cincinnati's stilted race relations, black community history, pressing issues, and personal neighborhood profiles. The anthology is book-ended by original Curnutte essays and features a foreword by the late Nathaniel Jones, retired federal judge and civil rights leader.
In 2013, Curnutte won a competitive Ford Foundation Grant for International Social Justice Reporting and published detailed investigatory stories and accompanying video on childhood slavery in Haiti (restaveks) and the living and working conditions of Haitian migrant cane cutters in the San Pedro de Macoris province -- timed to the release of a US Labor Department report corroborating the abuses of sugar workers throughout the Dominican Republic.
Besides recognition for his reporting and writing, Curnutte has been honored for his human rights work by the League of United American Citizens (LULAC), Ohio Latino Affairs Commission, Su Casa Hispanic Center of Cincinnati, Bridges for a Just Community (formerly the National Conference of Christians and Jews), and the Archdiocese of Cincinnati (Salesian Guild). The Miami University Alumni Association presented him in 2015 with its Bishop Medal for Meritorious Public Service.
At Miami, besides a regular introductory course on social justice studies, Curnutte teaches classes in social change, empowerment, creating global peace, a department capstone on social and political activism, and developed the syllabus for an annual course on career exploration for sociology and social justice studies majors. He has also worked with former chair Dr. Stephen Lippmann in creation of a department-based service learning program and established new partnerships for the university with several Cincinnati-based social justice and service agencies, including the Cincinnati-Hamilton County Community Action Agency and Immigration & Refugee Law Center.
Curnutte lives in Cincinnati with his wife, Diana Maria Lara.
Recent Publications
"Across the Color Line: Reporting 25 Years in Black Cincinnati," 2019, author, University of Cincinnati Press, https://ucincinnatipress.uc.
"A Promise in Haiti: A Reporter's Notes on Families and Daily Lives," 2011, author, Vanderbilt University Press, https://www.vanderbilt.edu/
"4 addresses in 4 month," 2019, the Cincinnati Enquirer, author, https://www.cincinnati.com/
"Labor Department finds bitterness in sugar workers' lives," 2013, author, USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/
"4 addresses in 4 month," 2019, the Cincinnati Enquirer, author, https://www.cincinnati.com/
"Labor Department finds bitterness in sugar workers' lives," 2013, author, USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/
Contact Info
- Upham Hall, 375
- (513) 529 2636
- curnutm2@miamioh.edu