President Barack Obama has nominated Linda Swartz Taglialatela, a career member of the Foreign Service, to be the next U.S. ambassador to Barbados, with responsibilities for St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Swartz Taglialatela was born in New York and is from Vestal, New York. She graduated from Vestal High, where she was in the marching band, in 1967. She first went to college at the State University of New York at Oneonta, where she earned a BA. She then left New York, going to Virginia Tech and earning an MBA there in 1973.

Swartz Taglialatela’s path to running an embassy has not been a traditional one. For one, she didn’t join the State Department right out of college. After leaving Virginia Tech, she became a management analyst at the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office).

She moved over to the State Department in 1979, but did similar work as an audit-qualified inspector and special assistant in the Office of the Inspector General. In 1984, she was named an administrative officer in the Bureau of International Communications and Information Policy.

Swartz Taglialatela’s first overseas posting came in 1987, when she was named counselor for administration at the embassy in Bern, Switzerland. She returned to Washington in 1989 and has been stationed there since. She was deputy director, and beginning in 1996 director, of the Office of Resource Management and Organization Analysis. Since 2002, Swartz Taglialatela has been Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Human Resources. She has worked on programs to bring more people into the department and to pass down institutional knowledge of the Foreign Service to newer officers.

-Steve Straehley

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