Jacques Leslie is the author of The Mark: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia. A draft of Deep Water won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. From the citation by judges Ted Conover, Jonathan Harr, and Sara Mosle: "Jacques Leslie's work in progress about dams around the world persuasively argues that water will be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th: an increasingly scarce but crucial natural resource that is `the prize' on a global battlefield. It's a struggle that involves every possible issue-- economic globalization, international politics, the clash of cultures, global warming, agricultural policy and conservation. Through the personal and professional experiences of an Indian activist, an American anthropologist and [an Australian water manager], Leslie explores and elucidates this complex material and makes it intelligible in elegant, beautiful prose."

Leslie is a former correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, 1971-1977. He was stationed in Saigon from January 1972 to July 1973; Phnom Penh, July 1973 to December 1973; Washington, D.C., January 1974 to July 1974; chief of New Delhi bureau, August 1974 to Sept 1975; Madrid, Oct 1975 to May 1976; chief of Hong Kong bureau, June 1976 to April 1977. His article, Running Dry: What Happens When the World No Longer Has Enough Freshwater? published in Harper's Magazine July 2000, was a finalist for the 2001 John B. Oakes Award in Distinguished Environmental Journalism. Among his other awards are the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award for best newspaper foreign correspondence, 1973 and an Overseas Press Club citation, 1973, "for incisive, consistently well-researched coverage of Vietnam and the Vietcong." His articles have also been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Orion, Wired, OnEarth, Newsweek, Washington Monthly, Parenting, Penthouse, Reader's Digest, and many other publications.

www.jacquesleslie.com

Tom Curwen

Tom Curwen is editor of the Los Angeles Times Outdoors section. He was a writer for the features section and deputy editor of the Book Review. Last year he was honored by the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors for three pieces he did for Outdoors on caving with nature writer, Barbara Hurd; on Alaskan bush pilots and the annual migration of sand hill cranes to the Bosque del Apache. He has a master's degree in Creative Writing from USC and was a recipient of a 1991 Academy of American Poets prize. In 2002, he received a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for mental health journalism.