Yvonne Latty - Personal and Professional Life

Personal and Professional Life

Latty was born to Albert and Ramona Latty. She and her older sister, Margie, grew up in a tenement in New York City’s South Harlem neighborhood, which was then overrun by drugs and poverty. The daughter of a Jamaican father and Dominican mother, Latty spent a lot of time on her fire escape, watching stories unfold on the streets below. What she saw and heard sparked her initial interest in telling stories — especially those of the unheard urban poor.

She attended New York University and received a BFA in film–television. After spending a few years as a photographer, she decided to become a writer. Latty received a master’s degree in journalism at NYU, and then worked for 13 years as a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News. There, she was an award-winning journalist specializing in urban issues. Her work has also been featured in USA Today, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Newsweek, NPR, Fox News, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Detroit Free Press, and the Miami Herald.

After 18 years as a newspaper reporter, Latty began teaching in NYU’s journalism program. There, she founded Pavement Pieces, a student-produced news website focused on local and national stories. Pavement Pieces has received two Excellence in Student Journalism Award from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for work on the LGBT community. and won a host of national awards for a package of the issues facing the Navajo.

In addition to heading the graduate journalism programs for Reporting New York/Reporting the Nation, she was the director of the institute’s Urban Journalism Workshop, an intensive multimedia program connecting city high school students to journalism.

She also appeared in two documentaries, the Emmy award-winning A Distant Shore: African Americans of D-Day and "Honor Deferred", a History Channel documentary about African Americans serving in World War II.