Jim Sterba has been a foreign correspondent, war correspondent, and national correspondent for more than four decades, first for The New York Times and then for The Wall Street Journal.
He began at the Evening Star in Washington, DC, in 1966 and a year later became assistant to James Reston, columnist at The New York Times. In 1969, he went to Vietnam to cover the war and moved to Jakarta eighteen months later as Times correspondent for Southeast Asia. During that time, he covered the 1971 India-Pakistan war; guerrilla wars in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines; famine in Afghanistan; and the return of US prisoners from Vietnam.
In 1973, Sterba became a national correspondent for the Times, based in Denver and Houston. He returned to Asia in 1979 to cover the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and stayed on as bureau chief in Hong Kong and China correspondent. He returned to New York in 1982 as a science reporter.
In November 1982, Sterba joined The Wall Street Journal as a reporter and editor on the foreign desk; he became an assistant foreign editor in 1984 and a senior special writer in 1986, reporting mainly from Asia. In 1989, he covered the Chinese student demonstrations and the subsequent military crackdown on them in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Later, while based in New York, he continued to travel to Asia and, in the United States, write about wildlife and outdoor sports.
Born in Detroit, Sterba grew up on a farm in central Michigan and is a graduate and distinguished alumnus of Michigan State University. He is the author of Frankie’s Place: A Love Story. He lives in New York City with his wife, the author Frances FitzGerald.
Contributions to Humans & Nature:
- Our Stewardship Responsibilities as an Apex Predator
A response to “Does hunting make us human?”
Noteworthy Links:
- JimSterba.com
Find out more about Jim Sterba’s writing and work.
Photo Credit: Dominique Nabokov.
