Evelyn Iritani is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and free-lance writer. A graduate of the University of Washington’s Department of Communications, she began her career at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and moved to the Los Angeles Times in 1995 to cover international economics. Her reporting garnered numerous awards, including the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and the George Polk Award for Economics Reporting for a series she co-authored on Wal-Mart. A longtime interest in Japan, her ancestral homeland, was the inspiration for her award-winning book “An Ocean Between Us: The Changing Relationship of Japan and the United States Told in Four Stories from the Life of an American Town.” She is currently working on a book about the exchange of civilian hostages between the U.S. and Japan during World War II.