Kem Knapp Sawyer

DIRECTOR OF REPORTING FELLOWS PROGRAM

Kem Knapp Sawyer is an editor at the Pulitzer Center and director of its Campus Consortium Reporting Fellow Program. She has reported on children at risk in CongoHaiti, Bangladesh, and India. Sawyer co-authored Congo's Children, a Pulitzer Center e-book, with Jon Sawyer, her husband and the Pulitzer Center's executive director.

Her books for young readers include Grace Akallo and the Pursuit of Justice for Child SoldiersRefugees: Seeking a Safe HavenThe Underground Railroad in American History, and biographies of Harriet Tubman, Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Gandhi, Anne Frank, Lucretia Mott, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Her feature stories and book reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Christian Science MonitorScholastic NewsCobblestone, and The Five Owls. She is also a contributor to the Dorling Kindersley (DK) Eyewitness Travel Guides.

Sawyer attended Yale University, where she majored in English and French and produced theater for children. She has taught creative dramatics in elementary schools and English and drama in high school. She also taught writing in the bachelor of fine arts program at the Corcoran College of Art + Design for 15 years before joining the Pulitzer Center.

The Sawyers have three grown daughters—and a dog named Shadow.

 

Kem Knapp Sawyer headshot