Colorado Press WomenTad Bartimus
Award-winning journalist and authorTad Bartimus shares her no-nonsense insights on the details of our lives in Among Friends, a weekly common-sense commentary from United Feature Syndicate that appears in newspapers nationwide.
Bartimus also regularly teaches writing at the Maui Writers Conference, at seminars in Provence, France, at writing retreats in Hawaii and Montana, and as a volunteer mentor at the public school where her husband teaches 6th grade.
For decades Bartimus has been a leader for women in journalism, working 30 years as a globe-trotting reporter. She was the Associated Press's first female bureau chief (1974) and first female special correspondent (1990). She has been a war correspondent in Vietnam, a foreign correspondent in Europe and Latin America and a special roving correspondent in the United States. When illness compelled Bartimus to leave the AP in 1993, she was named Atwood professor of journalism at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Bartimus contributed her story to the book WAR TORN: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam (Random House, 2002). She also wrote the text for Requiem, a collaborative effort with David Halberstam, Horst Faas and Tim Page that won Overseas Press Club and George Polk awards in 1998.
Bartimus co-authored Trinity's Children: Living Along America's Nuclear Highway with Wall Street Journal columnist Scott McCartney, and was a co-author with other band members, including Stephen King, Amy Tan and Matt Groening, of Mid-Life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America with Three Chords and an Attitude.
One of 55 women whose careers have been chronicled in the Washington Journalism Foundation's Oral History Project, Bartimus has also been awarded a lifetime achievement medal from her alma mater, the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
Twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing (1989, 1991), she has been honored for her writing by the Associated Press Managing Editors Association more times than any other living AP journalist. She has received Headliner and Inter American Press Association awards, and a year after launching Among Friends, Bartimus won the Clarion Award from the Association for Women in Communications for best editorial commentary over 100,000 circulation.
In 1985, Bartimus founded the Journalism and Women Symposium, an organization that aims to help women journalists and writers achieve their full potential.