Karen Houppert is City Paper’s Editor. Her reporting has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Washington Post Magazine, Newsday, The Nation, Salon, Slate, Mother Jones, Ms, The Village Voice, Al Jazeera, The Baltimore Sun, Urbanite, Style, etc. A former staff writer for The Village Voice, she has won several awards, including a National Women's Political Caucus Award, a 2003 Newswomen's Club of New York Front Page Award, several Nation Investigative Fund grants and a Kaiser Family Foundation Media Fellowship. She is the author of three nonfiction books, The Curse (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), Home Fires Burning (Ballantine, 2005), and Chasing Gideon: The Elusive Quest for Poor People’s Justice (The New Press, 2013). These days she is writing about the criminal justice system, race, poverty, education, politics—and their unholy mix here and in the nation at large. For more about her work, visit her website.