As a social worker, J. Malcolm Garcia worked with homeless people in San Francisco for fourteen years before he made the jump into journalism in 1995. The tragedy of September 11th, 2001, gave him the opportunity to work in Afghanistan. Since then he has written on Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Chad, Haiti, Honduras, Egypt and Argentina, among other countries. He is a recipient of the Studs Terkel Prize for writing about the working classes and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for excellence in journalism for his three-part series on the use of burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.