Conversations@CAAM July 11, 2009

Ann Maria Simmons is a general assignment reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

Until June 2007 she was the primary correspondent in the newspaper’s New Orleans bureau, where she spent 14 months covering the rebuilding effort in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Prior to moving to Louisiana, Ann was a roving reporter on the newspaper’s State Desk.

She joined the LA Times in 1997 as the newspaper’s bureau chief in Nairobi, where she reported from more than 30 countries in East, Central, and West Africa. Later, as Johannesburg bureau chief, her reporting focused on countries in southern Africa.

In 2003, on temporary assignment in the newspaper’s Baghdad bureau, Ann survived a suicide bomb attack that killed several people. She returned to Iraq in 2007, reporting from several cities and regions, including Baghdad, Basra, Yusifiya, and Owesat, in the so-called Triangle of Death.

Prior to joining the LA Times, Ann worked for TIME magazine. She was based in Moscow in the early 1990s, covering the former Soviet Union. She later covered the U.S. State Department and foreign policy during the first Clinton Administration. She reported on the war in the Balkans in the mid-1990s, and the intervention of U.S. troops into Haiti.

Ann holds joint Bachelor of Arts degrees in Russian and Norwegian from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England; and a Masters degree in journalism from Columbia University, New York. She was a Nieman journalism fellow at Harvard University, class of 2003.

Ann is British. She was born in England to Caribbean parents.

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