In this episode of "Keen On", Andrew is joined by Lizzie Johnson, the author of "Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire", to discuss what went wrong surrounding the 2018 wildfires in California and how to avert future tragedies as the climate crisis unfolds.
Lizzie Johnson is a local enterprise reporter at the Washington Post. Previously, she was a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle. She is a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism.
Lizzie has worked at The Dallas Morning News, The Omaha World-Herald, The Chicago Tribune, and El Sol de San Telmo in Buenos Aires. To pay off her student loans, she’s worked in a call center and at a catering company, as a waitress, a barista, an indoor cycling instructor, and a nanny. In 2019, she enrolled in and graduated from a professional firefighting academy to better understand wildfires.
Lizzie is a three-time finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. The California News Publishers Association has recognized her for Best Writing, Best Profile, Best Enterprise and Best Feature. In 2021, she won first place for long-form feature writing in the Best of the West contest. She has appeared on Longform Podcast, This American Life, Longreads, and Climate One from the Commonwealth Club.
Her work has been featured by the Columbia Journalism Review, the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, and Harvard’s Nieman Storyboard. In 2020, Lauren Markham nicely profiled Lizzie’s wildfire coverage. Raised in the Midwest, Lizzie and her dog, Indie, currently call Washington, D.C. home.
Lizzie Johnson on California's Deadly Camp Fire