Kem Knapp Sawyer

Kem Knapp Sawyer was formerly the director of the Reporting Fellows program at the Pulitzer Center.

Kem Knapp Sawyer was a Pulitzer Center editor and director of its Campus Consortium Reporting Fellows program. She has reported on children at risk in Congo, Haiti, Bangladesh, and India. Sawyer co-authored Congo's Children, a Pulitzer Center e-book, with her husband, Pulitzer Center Founder Jon Sawyer.

Kem Knapp Sawyer's books for young readers include Grace Akallo and the Pursuit of Justice for Child Soldiers, Refugees: Seeking a Safe Haven, The 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, Christian Science Monitor, Scholastic News, Cobblestone, and The Five Owls. She was 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. Sawyer also taught writing in the BFA program at the Corcoran College of Art + Design for 15 years before joining the Pulitzer Center. 

Kem and Jon Sawyer have three grown daughters, and a dog named Shadow.

Please visit kemsawyer.com.