Beth Macy is a Virginia-based journalist who writes about outsiders and underdogs. Raised in a small Ohio town, she was the first in her family to go to college, an event that drastically changed (and maybe even saved) her life. Having delivered newspapers as a child, she spent most of her career writing for them. As her industry imploded, Macy switched to book-writing at the age of fifty, becoming the award-winning author of three New York Times-bestselling books examining communities left behind by corporate greed and political indifference. Her first book, Factory Man, explored the aftermath of globalization on rural communities and won a J. Anthony Lukas Prize. Dopesick, her investigation of the opioid crisis, was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal, won the L.A. Times Book Prize for Science and Technology, and was described as a “masterwork of narrative nonfiction” by The New York Times. Dopesick was made into a Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning Hulu series on which Macy served as an executive producer and cowriter.
A Guggenheim Fellow and a Nieman Fellow for Journalism at Harvard, Macy has also written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Her next book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, is a combination memoir and reported analysis of the rural-urban divide told through the lenses of backward mobility, political polarization, and the decimation of local news. Paper Girl grew out of an NYT essay she wrote about her mother’s death. Penguin Press will publish it on October 7, 2025.
Photo by Meredith Roller