The full bio

MARTIN MERZER was born on July 8, 1947, in New York City,
served in the Army from 1966 to 1968 and graduated from
Hunter College, City University of New York, in 1973 with a
bachelor's degree in English.

After six years as a general assignment reporter and
business news writer for The Associated Press in Miami and
New York, Merzer joined The Miami Herald in 1979 as a
business writer. He became The Herald's Jerusalem bureau
chief in late l983 and later served as a national correspondent
and as a member of the newspaper’s enterprise team.

He now is The Herald's senior writer, and has primary responsibility
for hurricane coverage.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, he moved to
Washington for four months and served The Herald and parent
company Knight Ridder Newspapers as the primary anchor of
the 9/11 and war on Afghanistan stories.

He later spent a month in Israel reporting on the wave of suicide
bombings and retaliatory actions there.

In 2003, he served as Knight Ridder’s main anchor for the Iraqi
War, again spending four months in the Washington bureau. He twice
returned to Washington in 2005 to anchor the company’s coverage of
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Merzer has covered the civil war in Beirut, the famine in Ethiopia
and the Sudan, the Challenger disaster and the space shuttle’s
return to flight, Hurricane Andrew, the Gulf War, the assassination
of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the Mars Pathfinder
mission, the John Glenn mission and a wide variety of other stories.

In 1992, his work during Hurricane Andrew helped The Herald win
the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. In 2000, his work during the
Elian Gonzalez affair helped The Herald win another Pulitzer Prize.

He is the main author of The Miami Herald Report: Democracy
Held Hostage, a book published in June 2001 by St. Martin’s Press.