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SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Mark Stricherz is a writer and reporter in Washington, D.C. He was the lead reporter for CQ-Roll Call’s magazine stories about the State Department’s shoddy oversight of the Peoples Temple farm commune in Jonestown, Guyana, and a limited-series podcast on the Jonestown massacre of 1978, which the publication nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2019. He is the author of Why the Democrats are Blue (Encounter Books, 2007) and has covered Congress for a decade.

His articles seek to illuminate the dark or unexplored corners of American life and discover if there is hope, despair, or something in between. He has written about big-city slums and -schools, abortion, policies on drugs and mental illness, life in Congress, the struggles of a fintech startup, compromised intellectuals, the unaccountable United States Conference on Catholic Bishops, and the revolution in the Democratic Party’s coalition and presidential nominating rules.

He got his start in journalism as a paper carrier for his hometown daily, The Contra Costa Times, when he was twelve years old. He has written for many publications, including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Roll Call and CQ, CBS News, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, National Review Online, First Things, RealClearPolitics, Education Week, Crisis, Commonweal, Aleteia, Christianity Today, The Nation, and The New Republic. He has appeared as a guest on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” and his writings have received awards from Washington Independent Writers and The Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship.

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