John Virtue

John Virtue is an author, journalist and academic. A native of Canada, he is currently the director of the International Media Center at Florida International University in Miami. His latest book is What's to Know About Mexico: One Thousand Questions and Answers About America's Southern Neighbor. He explains the contributions Mexicans have made, including the pre-Columbian engineering of corn and the nineteenth century creation of the iconic American cowboy. This is the fifth book he has...See more

John Virtue is an author, journalist and academic. A native of Canada, he is currently the director of the International Media Center at Florida International University in Miami. His latest book is What's to Know About Mexico: One Thousand Questions and Answers About America's Southern Neighbor. He explains the contributions Mexicans have made, including the pre-Columbian engineering of corn and the nineteenth century creation of the iconic American cowboy. This is the fifth book he has written that deals, in one way or another, with Mexico: Leonard and Reva Brooks: Artists in Exile in San Miguel de Allende; Model American Abroad: A Biography of Stirling Dickinson; Fred Taylor: Brother in the Shadows; and South of the Color Barrier: How Jorge Pasquel and the Mexican League Pushed Baseball Toward Racial Integration. The Pasquel book won the 2008 Robert Peterson Recognition Award for scholarship. Virtue spent 18 years as a foreign correspondent and news agency executive in Latin America for United Press International, based in Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela. He left the agency to become executive editor of the Spanish-language daily newspaper El Mundo in San Juan, Puerto Rico. At Florida International University he has led workshops on ethics and the role of the press in a democracy to 2,000 mid-career journalists in 16 Latin American countries. He gave a clandestine workshop in Havana in 2002 for independent journalists opposed to the Cuban government. Virtue, who is a naturalized American, is married to Anna Virtue, a former reporter/researcher in the Miami bureau of the Los Angeles Times. Their son, Mark, is a software engineer with Amazon.com who lives with his family in Port Orchard, Wash. See less