Katherine Kam

Katherine Kam is an award-winning journalist who has written about health, medicine, travel, cultures, social issues, and many other topics.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she covered the first shelter-in-place order in the U.S., the virus’s disproportionate effect on African Americans, and the mental health fallout among Americans.

Her work has appeared in many media outlets, including The Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, WebMD, Salon, New America Media, NBC News, and Time Inc. and Time Warner publications. Her stories have won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Business Press, and Time Inc.’s Henry R. Luce Awards.

After receiving a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship, she spent a year reporting on the emotional struggles of Asian American students. Her three-part series, which published in New America Media, reached at least 7.8 million readers, according to the Carter Center. The National Alliance on Mental Illness featured the project on its website, and the Journalism Center on Children and Families and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism cited the series as an example of best practices in mental health reporting.

She earned a BA in English from the University of California, Davis and an MA in magazine journalism from Syracuse University. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.