As a newspaper staff writer at The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, and Willamette Week, the subjects I covered were eclectic: suspicious marriages and ghostly steam plants; foster kids and cage fighters; schizophrenia and the kidnapping of a duck named Gooey, to name just a few.
I’ve received national journalism awards for investigative reporting, food reporting, sports reporting, education reporting, healthcare reporting, and longform writing. A four-part series about high-school coaches who molest athletes was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. I’m proud of all of those things, but if you ask me why I do what I do—which involves a lot of sitting at a desk, reading, typing, and agonizing over sentences—I will say it’s because it matters to real people. True stories can change lives.
For the past few years, I’ve been focused on longer narrative journalism writing for Kindle, along with a whole bunch of food writing for Modernist Cuisine, helping to produce an enormous and well-received cookbook called Modernist Bread. In the last few years, my work has been published by The Red Bulletin, Fast Company, Scientific American, Narratively, Forbes, Undark, Yes! Magazine, Kaiser Health News, and more. I also like to do writing work for nonprofits and public agencies, including Health Share of Oregon and the Institute for Natural Medicine.
Today, I’m based in Portland, Oregon, where I can intersperse trips to the great outdoors with my desk-sitting. And, yes, I still enjoy deciphering dense public records just as much as I do sitting in strangers’ kitchens, just listening.