Kirstin Downey

Kirstin Downey, an award-winning reporter at the Washington Post for 20 years, has written extensively on the human implications of important financial trends, particularly the boom and bust cycles of the modern economy. From 2005 to 2007, Downey led the country in reporting on the growth of risky new kinds of mortgages that threatened the nation’s economic system and that led to an explosion of foreclosures across America.

She left the Post in 2008 to complete her book, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins, which was published by Nan A. Talese at Random House. The book highlights the life and accomplishments of Perkins, a visionary social worker who was the architect of the Social Security Act, unemployment insurance and many other key social programs. The book was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2009 by the Library of Congress, the American Library Association, by National Public Radio's Maureen Corrigan and by the Los Angeles Times. It was released as a paperback in 2010.

Downey recently served as a writer and researcher for the report of the New York Times best-selling Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a study commissioned by the US Congress and Obama Administration to investigate the causes and consequences of the corporate meltdown of 2008. She helped conduct hearings held in Florida, Nevada and California that examined foreclosure problems and mortgage abuses, and how they have affected average citizens and state finances. She wrote the first chapter of the book that detailed the warnings issued by business leaders and consumer groups in the years preceding the crash.

Downey is currently co-editing a book on Social Security, A Promise to All Generations: Stories and Essays about Social Security and Frances Perkins, which will be published by the non-profit Frances Perkins Center in Newcastle, Maine.

She is also researching a biography of Queen Isabella, the Spanish queen who sponsored Christopher Columbus and, like Frances Perkins, another woman who changed the history of the world. It will be published by Random House in 2013.

In 2000, Downey was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, where she studied American economic history at Harvard Business School. In 2008, she shared in the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Washington Post staff for its coverage of the campus slayings at Virginia Tech.

Downey, a Pennsylvania State University graduate, grew up in the Panama Canal Zone. She is married to Neil Averitt and together they have five children. Her daughter Rachel is the youngest and best. (This sentence is being inserted at her suggestion.)