She told the stories of families uprooted by Katrina and found her own healing in their words

Many New Orleans families were unexpectedly still living away from home months after Hurricane Katrina hit. Relocated in cities near and far, parents were navigating not just the loss of their homes, but also the loss of their routines and their children’s sense of stability.

Amid the chaos, parents fought to keep their careers afloat and their families sane. From living in crowded shelters to attending unfamiliar schools in distant places, children and their caretakers found the emotional toll debilitating. 

No one knows this better than Barri Bronston, an editorial writer at Tulane University, who, in 2005, was a feature writer for the “living” section of The Times-Picayune.

Soon after the storm, Bronston realized the urgent need for parenting stories about families, much like her own, who frantically relocated to other cities with children and had to navigate a whole new world. Such stories became a touchstone for families who needed direction and comfort in such a difficult period. 

“From the time Katrina hit all the way through January, February, I was concentrating on stories that dealt with families and how families were surviving the storm and, you know, how children were dealing with it,” Bronston recalled. 

Bronston and her daughter, then 14 years old, evacuated before the storm to Houston and she was stunned to see that many New Orleans families had done the same. So she got back to work, reporting and telling stories, as she had first learned to do at the University of Missouri.

Bronston graduated from the journalism school in 1981, worked short stints at two newspapers before landing a position in New Orleans at The Times-Picayune. She covered general assignments in a suburban bureau between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, but it was always feature storytelling that pulled at her most and eventually helped land her dream role as a feature writer. 

After having her daughter, Sally, in the early 1990s, Bronston was asked to lead a new parenting section at the paper. So, when Hurricane Katrina hit, she was a natural. 

“I had an office space and just started working on stories that were basically covering New Orleanians who were in Houston, how they were dealing with the evacuation while trying to figure out what was going on with their own homes in New Orleans,” Bronston said. 

Many of Bronston’s post-Katrina parenting stories were inspired by her personal experiences. In some ways, interviewing families was therapy for her. “You were talking to people that were in the same boat as you were, the same situation,” she said. 

One early story, headlined “Just add students,” focused on how Houston schools opened their doors to evacuated students. 

“My daughter had just started at Ben Franklin High School here in New Orleans, and she was there for a week and then the hurricane happened,” Bronston said. 

Her daughter spent the fall semester in 2005 at a private school in Houston, which like many others waived tuition for affected students.

“You couldn’t go weeks and months without being in school,” Bronston said.

Another article, “Their lost senior year,” captured the heartbreak of New Orleans seniors displaced across the country during what should have been a celebratory time. 

“It was all about how seniors were dealing with this, and you know, they’re trying to figure out where they’re gonna go to college and all that kind of stuff,” she said. 

One of her most personal stories focused on adult children housing their parents during the storm, titled “My roommates, my parents.” 

“My parents lived with us for nine months while their house was rebuilt,” Bronston recalled. “The roles were reversed, so now my parents were under my roof, kind of having to follow my rules.”

One story was notably different, though. The Living section put together a series of more than a hundred short stories, “Katrina’s Lives Lost,” to tell the victims’ personal stories — who they were, what their lives were like and whether they decided to stay for the storm.

Bronston’s story focused on a 54-year-old bus driver who had decided to ride out the storm at home with his wife, son and elderly aunt, who had chosen to stay at her nephew’s house because of his car. But when flood waters rushed into the Lower Ninth Ward after the levee that was supposed to protect their neighborhood failed, the family had nowhere to flee. 

The one-story house had no attic. All four perished. Ironically, the aunt’s home had stayed high and dry. 

Editors chose Bronston’s story from all the others in the series to become part of the paper’s 20-story entry in the public service category of the Pulitzer Prizes. The entry won the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service, as well as in Breaking News.

Pulitzer judges noted that they recognized The Times-Picayune “for its heroic, multi-faceted coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, making exceptional use of the newspaper’s resources to serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant.” 

Bronston said the recognition was beyond anything she had ever imagined.

“Even though I wasn’t involved in getting in a boat, you know, the dramatic stories that you’ve probably heard about, the fact that I was part of the package of stories that won the Pulitzer was a major thrill for me,” she said.