Lisa Belkin

Known for tales that are deeply researched and artfully told, Lisa Belkin has spent a career covering American social issues, as a daily journalist, a magazine writer and a book author.

During nearly 30 years at The New York Times, she was variously a national correspondent (based in Houston), a medical reporter, a Contributing Writer for The New York Times Magazine, and the creator of the Life’s Work column and the Motherlode blog. She has spent the past decade in the digital realm, in senior positions at HuffPost and Yahoo News.

Belkin is the author of four books, most recently Genealogy of a Murder: Four Generations, Three Families, One Fateful Night, which has received uniformly rave reviews including from such publications and The New York Times, NPR and The Wall Street Journal; it has been described as “riveting”, “magestically sweeping,” “hauntingly powerful,” and “a hell of a great read.”

Her previous books were Life’s Work, Confessions of an Unbalanced Mom, First, Do No Harm, and Show Me A Hero, which was made into an HBO miniseries of the same name and nominated for, among other things: a Golden Globe, Satellite, Critics Choice and NAACP Image Award for acting; a Writers Guild and Scripter Award for best writing; and a Critics Choice and Satellite award for best miniseries.

In other media, Belkin was the host of “Life’s Work with Lisa Belkin”, on XM Radio, as well as a regular contributor to Public Radio’s The Takeaway and NBC’s Today Show. A graduate of Princeton University, she has returned there as a visiting professor in the Humanities Council, teaching narrative non- fiction as an instrument of social change. Since 2015 she has taught reporting, writing and narrative non-fiction at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.