Katherine (Kate) Boo is an award-winning journalist known primarily for writing about America's poor and disadvantaged.
A native of Washington, D.C., Boo graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College and began her career in journalism with editorial positions at Washington's City Paper and then the Washington Monthly. From there she went to the Washington Post, from 1993 to 2003.
In 2000, her series for the Post about group homes for the mentally impaired won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The Pulitzer judges noted that her work
"disclosed wretched neglect and abuse in the city’s group homes for the mentally retarded, which forced officials to acknowledge the conditions and begin reforms."[1]
In 2003, she joined the staff of the New Yorker, to which she had been contributing since 2001.[2] One of her subsequent articles, "The Marriage Cure," won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2004. The article chronicled efforts to teach poor people in an Oklahoma community about marriage in hopes that the classes would help people avoid or escape poverty.
Another of Boo's New Yorker articles, "After Welfare," won the 2002 Sidney Hillman Award, which honors articles that advance the cause of social justice.[3]
She was a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, from 2002 through 2006.[4] In 2002, she won a MacArthur Fellowship.