As a former staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor, Lynda Schuster began her career in the 1980s in the Journal’s Dallas bureau before being named the Central America correspondent, reporting on the wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala. In 1983, she became the Journal’s Mexico bureau chief.
Following the assassination in Honduras of her first husband, Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent Dial Torgerson, Schuster was transferred to Beirut where she covered the Lebanese civil war. Later she became the Journal’s South America correspondent.
Schuster left the Journal in the late 1980s to follow her current husband, Dennis Jett, to his diplomatic posting in Malawi. Not long after arriving there, The Christian Science Monitor offered her a job as its South Africa bureau chief. In that capacity, Schuster covered the final throes of the apartheid regime.
She had to cease working in daily journalism to accompany her husband to his ambassadorial postings in Mozambique (1993) and Peru (1996). Her writing has since appeared in Granta, Utne, and The Atlantic, among others.
She wrote “A Burning Hunger: One Family’s Struggle Against Apartheid” a 2004 book about the Mashininis, a black South African family of 13 children, all of whom were deeply involved in helping to bring down the apartheid government.
She she is now at work on a book about the scandalous heiress and Pittsburgh philanthropist, Mary Schenley, and lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and daughter, Noa. She blogs on foreign affairs.