Dori J. Maynard

Dori J. Maynard (May 4, 1958 – February 24, 2015) was an American writer and journalist. She was the president of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in Oakland, California, and the co-author of Letters to My Children, a compilation of nationally syndicated columns by her late father Robert C. Maynard, for which she wrote introductory essays.

Career Doris Judith Maynard was born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 4, 1958, to Elizabeth Rosen and Robert C. Maynard, a journalist and the later co-owner of The Oakland Tribune. Maynard was the only child of Elizabeth and Robert, who divorced in 1963. As a teenager, Maynard worked at a regional fast-food restaurant to earn money, and traveled to Africa before applying to college. After graduating, she went on to report for The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Massachusetts. In 1989, she moved to Detroit, and worked for the Detroit Free Press, where her reporting focused on politics and poverty. After receiving the prestigious Nieman Fellowship, a year-long journalism program at Harvard University, Maynard moved to the Boston area in 1992.

Maynard served on the board of the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi Foundation beginning in 1999, which renamed their Diversity Leadership Program after her in 2015. She was also a board member of the American Society of News Editors, where she was posthumously recognized with a scholarship through the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Accolades When she received the Neiman fellowship in 1993, she and her father became the first father-daughter duo to be named Nieman fellows, as her father had earned the accomplishment in 1966. and was voted one of the "10 Most Influential African Americans in the Bay Area" in 2004 by CityFlight Media Network.

In 2008, she received the Asian American Journalists Association's Leadership in Diversity Award.

On February 24, 2015, at the age of 56, Maynard died from complications of lung cancer.