Diana Marcum (1963 – August 9, 2023) was an American writer and journalist, focused especially on California'sCentral Valley. She was a 2018Nieman Fellow, and won the 2015Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, for her series "Scenes from California's Dust Bowl".
Marcum worked as an assistant atThe San Bernardino Sun as a young woman, then became a reporter. She was a reporter and a columnist atThe Fresno Bee,[2] and was on the staff of theLos Angeles Times from 2011 to 2022. She often wrote about California's Central Valley and the people and communities who live there, but she also wrote two book-length travel memoirs, about the Azores and Belize.[3][4]
Marcum won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2015, for "offering nuanced portraits of lives affected by the state's drought, bringing an original and empathic perspective to the story" in herLos Angeles Times series "Scenes from California's Dust Bowl".[5] She was awarded a Nieman Fellowship in 2018.[6] "If we only write about the bad, that’s not a complete picture.There is a lot of perseverance and faith and friendship and humor. There’s everything. It’s a big, complex world of good and bad. And the good counts", she explained about her storytelling in 2015.[7]
