Clara Jeffery (born August 25, 1967, in Baltimore, Maryland) is a co-editor of Mother Jones magazine [1]. (Monika Bauerlein is the other co-Editor.) Jeffery was promoted to that position in August 2006, following the departure of Russ Rymer; previously she was the magazine's Deputy Editor, a position she had held for four years. Prior to that Jeffery was a Senior Editor at Harper's magazine (1995–2002), where she edited six articles nominated for a National Magazine Award, including essays by Barbara Ehrenreich that became Nickel and Dimed, and several anthologized in the "Best American" series.
At Mother Jones magazine, Jeffery has edited much of the magazine's coverage of climate change, including the magazine's 2006 Oceans package [2] and a 2005 article by Chris Mooney on ExxonMobil's funding of climate change skeptics, which was nominated for a National Magazine Award [3]. Jeffery also headed up Mother Jones magazine's Iraq War Timeline project [4] and edited Charles Bowden's "Exodus," an in-depth investigation into immigration and border policy [5].
Together, Jeffery and Bauerlein have overhauled Mother Jones magazine's website, putting a much greater emphasis on staff-generated, daily news and original reporting.
In 2002, Jeffery wrote an article on the Salton Sea for Harper's, "Go West Old Man: Where the American Dream Goes Down the Drain," [6] which received an honorable mention in Best American Science and Nature Writing. She has also written for Slate [7], the Huffington Post, San Francisco Magazine [8], and The Chicago Reporter.
Between 1993 and 1995, Jeffery was a staff editor and writer at Washington City Paper.
Jeffery grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and attended the Sidwell Friends School ('85), before going to Carleton College ('89). She got a Master's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1993.
Her father, David Jeffery, was, for most of his career, a senior writer and editor at the National Geographic Magazine.[9] Her mother, Pam Barratt, was a high-school science teacher and remains a human-rights activist.[10] Her brother, Charles, is a federal law-enforcement officer.