Beth Macy is a Virginia-based journalist who writes about outsiders and underdogs. Raised in a small Ohio town, she was the first in her family to go to college, an event that drastically changed (and maybe even saved) her life. A former newspaper writer, Macy is the award-winning author of three New York Times bestselling books that have examined communities left behind by corporate greed and political indifference. Her first book, Factory Man, explored the aftermath of globalization and won a J. Anthony Lukas Prize. Dopesick was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal, won the L.A. Times Book Prize for Science and Technology, and was described as a “masterwork of narrative nonfiction” by The New York Times. Dopesick was made into a Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning Hulu series on which Macy served as an executive producer and cowriter.

A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2010 Nieman Fellow for Journalism at Harvard, Macy has also written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Her latest book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, is a combination memoir and reported analysis of the rural-urban divide told through the lenses of declining mobility, political polarization, and the decimation of local and regional news.

Photo Credit: Meredith Roller