Jane Mayer bio

Jane Mayer joined The New Yorker magazine as a staff writer in March 1995. She writes on politics and the war on terror. Recent subjects that Mayer has covered include Alberto Mora and the Pentagon’s secret torture policy, how the U.S. outsources torture, Guantanamo Bay, and CIA interrogations. She has also written about George W. Bush, the bin Laden family, Sarah Palin, and the television show 24.

Prior to joining The New Yorker staff, Mayer worked for 12 years as a Wall Street Journal reporter. She was a war correspondent, foreign correspondent, and the first female White House correspondent for the Journal.

Mayer has won various awards for her writing, including the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2008, Edward Weintal Prize from Georgetown University in 2009, and the Ridenhour Book Prize. She was twice a finalist for a National Magazine Award and nominated twice by the Journal for a Pulitzer Prize in the feature-writing category. She was a recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2008.

Her 2008 book The Dark Side was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 10 best books of the year, and by The Economist, Salon, Slate, and Bloomberg as one of the best books of the year. Her book Strange Justice was a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award for nonfiction.

• Staff Writer, The New Yorker magazine, 1995-present
• Former Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
• First Wall Street Journal female White House Correspondent, 1984
• Former Metropolitan Reporter, Washington Star
• Former Stringer, Time

• B.A., Yale University, 1977

• The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, 2008
• Strange Justice (Co-written with Jill Abramson), 1994
• Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988 (Co-written with Doyle McManus), 1989

Jane Mayer, Staff writer
Website: New Yorker magazine