Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson

Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson is a senior lecturer, nonfiction essayist, freelance journalist, and science & technology writer. She is a former staff writer at the Miami Herald and Johns Hopkins Magazine, among other publications. A Pulitzer Center Grantee and Pushcart Prize Nominee, she has written for such venues as The Washington Post, Scientific American, USA Today, The Rumpus, The Sun literary magazine, Creative Nonfiction, and the NPR local affiliate, WYPR, as well as in the book collections Letters to J.D. Salinger (University of Wisconsin Press) and Signs of Life in the USA (Bedford/St. Martin’s).

Cavanaugh Simpson has been a longtime lecturer at Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars; founding editor of 3QR: The Three Quarter Review and author of Literature on Deadline: The Art of Journalism (Caldwell Publishing). Her Pulitzer Center work can be found here. As a foreign correspondent, she has also written for such venues as the Baltimore Sun and American Journalism Review, reporting from Argentina, India, Nepal, China and Cuba.

Cavanaugh Simpson earned her bachelor’s from the University of Maryland; her master’s from Johns Hopkins’ Writing Seminars, with thesis supported by a Goldsmith Research Award from Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center; and her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College, where she earned the Christine White Award in literary journalism. She is also a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Arts Innovation Grant to foster the next generation of scientist essayists. As a lecturer, she also served as co-editor of the M.A. in Writing Program’s PennUnion thesis journal from 2003 to 2014, and earned a Johns Hopkins Excellence in Teaching award. Memberships include the National Association of Science Writers (NASW); American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA); Society for Professional Journalists (SPJ); Authors Guild; Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW); and PEN America.