Kay Mills

Kay Mills is a career journalist and author of five books. Born in Washington, D.C., she is a graduate of Pennsylvania State University (B.A.) and Northwestern University (M.A.). She started her career as a broadcast news writer for United Press International in Chicago, then covered education and child welfare for the Baltimore Evening Sun. For 1-1/2 years, she was assistant press secretary for U.S. Senator Edmund S. Muskie, then returned to journalism with the Washington bureau of the Newhouse newspapers. She joined the Los Angeles Times as an editorial writer in 1978 and later was assistant editor of its Sunday Opinion section. She left the Times in 1991 to write books and freelance fulltime. In addition to her work for the Los Angeles Times, she has written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Dallas Morning News, Ms., Mother Jones, Governing, the Columbia Journalism Review, and other publications. She often writes about higher education, most recently for the University of Southern California's Trojan Family Magazine. See for example,
http://www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/trojan_family/summer07/enron.html.

Shy as a child, Mills was drawn to journalism because it offered her a reason to ask people questions and the opportunity to write. She loved writing from fifth grade on when she wrote stories about an adventurous penny (perhaps influenced by the radio program, “Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar”). Her father’s best friend and her uncle were also journalists, and she thought her uncle, who worked nights, had especially wonderful hours because he didn’t have to get up first thing in the morning. Mills also remembers seeing May Craig, the Maine newspaper correspondent, on “Meet The Press,” and was unaware at the time that Craig was one of the few women in what was then a man’s world. What she did know was that Craig was on TV asking questions of newsmakers and so perhaps this would be a possible line of work for her.

In addition to her newspaper jobs, Mills has taught journalism and writing courses at George Mason University, the University of Southern California, the University of Minnesota and Princeton University, where she was a Ferris Professor. She has also lectured as an Alumni Fellow at Penn State, as a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow at Berry College,Columbia College, and Illinois College, and as a Hearst Visiting Professional at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. She has chaired biography juries for both the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Mills served on the founding board of the Journalism and Women Symposium.

She has been a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and has held a Program of African Studies Fellowship at Northwestern University, a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Research Fellowship at the University of Virginia and an Alicia Patterson Fellowship for research and writing about the Head Start program for pre-school children.

This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer received the Christopher Award in 1993 and the Julia Spruill Book Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians for the best book on southern women’s history published in 1993 and 1994. The Hamer biography is available in paperback from the University Press of Kentucky. Mills is also author of A Place in the News: From the Women’s Pages to the Front Page (Columbia University Press); From Pocahontas to Power Suits: Everything You Need to Know About Women’s History in America (Plume paperbacks); Something Better for My Children: The History and People of Head Start (Dutton and Plume paperbacks), which was praised by Jonathan Kozol as “a wonderful book, rich with history, vitality and hope. It should be required reading for the President and members of Congress.” George Wood, author of Schools That Work, said the Head Start book “gives flesh and blood to the often sterile and lifeless policy debates over funding programs for children.” Mills is also the author of Changing Channels: The Civil Rights Case That Transformed Television (University Press of Mississippi).