Paula M. Span

Paula Span spent 16 years as a New York correspondent for the Washington Post Style section and a staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine. She now writes "The New Old Age (link is external)," a column about aging and caregiving, for the New York Times. Her book “When the Time Comes (link is external)," following several families caring for aging parents, was published by Hachette.  More recently, she adapted her Generation Grandparent columns for the New York Times into an audio title, released by Audible, called “The Bubbe Diaries (link is external).” To her great surprise, she is the narrator.

An inveterate freelancer, she has written for dozens of newspapers and magazines including New York, Esquire, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Smithsonian, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer and USA Today. She publishes long Q&As for Amazon’s Kindle Single Interview project. She speaks at conferences and gatherings around the country about aging and grandparenting. 

She has taught journalism at Montclair State University and was a McGraw Professor in Writing at Princeton; she has led workshops for the Alaska Press Club, the South Asian Journalists Association and the Washington Post In-House University. She graduated from the Boston University School of Public Communication, then dropped out of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

She blames her entire career on having read back-to-back kid lit biographies of Joseph Pulitzer and Nellie Bly in the fourth grade.