Richard Parker

Richard Leo Parker

Richard Parker, an author and award-winning journalist whose career spanned more than three decades, and three continents died in El Paso, Texas on March 6, 2025, of heart failure.

In his professional life, he was the author of The Crossing: El Paso, The Southwest, and America's Forgotten Origin Story and Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America, among other works.

He was an Op-Ed Contributor for The New York Times, wrote for The Atlantic, was a Sunday columnist at the Houston Chronicle, a columnist for The Dallas Morning News, Politico Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, among many other leading publications. In 2018, he won the top award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. In 2019, NBC News named him one of the nation's 20 most influential Latinos for his coverage of the El Paso massacre. Early in his career, he was a reporter for the Albuquerque Journal.

In his personal life, he was a longtime resident of Washington, D.C., Austin, Wimberley and El Paso, Texas. He loved the Texas Hill Country, fly fishing, bird hunting and the Mexican Caribbean. He is survived by sister Janet Collins of Phoenix, Arizona, his mother Josefina Parker of El Paso, and daughters Olivia Parker and husband Chris of Brooklyn, New York and Isabel Parker of Denver, Colorado.

A son of the Southwest, he was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, raised in El Paso and earned a bachelor's degree at Trinity University in San Antonio; while there he graduated from U.S. Army Reserve Officers Training Corps basic training in Kentucky as well as the Boulder Outdoor School of Survival in Utah. He earned a master's degree from Tulane University in New Orleans. In 1999, he was given the honorary rank of captain in the U.S. Air Force while deployed to Europe with the 2nd Bomb Wing.

His work spanned more than 30 years as a reporter, bureau chief, editor and magazine publisher before becoming an independent author. In the early 2000s, he was a consultant to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the National Intelligence Council. His journalism took him to Washington, the presidential campaign trail, Mexico, as well as armed conflicts in Latin America, the Middle East and Europe.

He taught at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas State University, received fellowships from the Council for the United States and Italy, the Times-Mirror Foundation and the Knight Center at the University of Maryland. He won numerous awards, including from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, the Associated Press Managing Editors of Texas and New Mexico, the New Mexico Press Association and the National Press Club. A private memorial is planned for family and friends on June 6, 2025 in El Paso, Texas.