Jed Horne

Jed Horne is a prize-winning journalist and book writer who has reported from all over the world. Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans during his tenure as city editor of the local newspaper, triggered a fascination with disasters that inspired Breach of Faith (Random House, 2006), his critically acclaimed book about the storm and a region's recovery from it. His paper was awarded two Pulitzer prizes for its Katrina coverage that included work written and edited by Horne.

He retired from daily journalism in 2007 and journeyed to Cuba in 2009 as part of a delegation seeking to exchange civil defense strategies for dealing with hurricanes. In 2010, following the BP rig explosion and blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, he was appointed senior consultant to President Obama's National Oil Spill Commission and since then has continued to further his knowledge and sharpen his perspective on ways in which societies around the world recover from calamities that might seem to have been their death knell.

Horne has been interviewed on radio and television shows by a gamut of opinion-makers, including Bill O'Reilly, Rachel Maddow, Tavis Smiley, Terry Gross, Amy Goodman, Charlie Rose, Al Franken, and many others. He has spoken at universities all across the country, from Harvard to Berkeley and the University of Kyoto.

He was born and educated in Massachusetts and cut his teeth as a journalist with The Boston Phoenix. He worked in New York throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s as a writer and editor, primarily with Time, Inc. publications. In the late 1980s, he moved to New Orleans, then later to Latin America where he worked as a foreign correspondent in the 1990s, covering the unwinding of the civil wars that had wracked Nicaragua and El Salvador for a decade. He also covered the US invasion of Somalia and the painful "special period" in Cuba following the collapse of Castro’s sponsor, the Soviet Union.

His first book, Desire Street (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2005), chronicled a Louisiana death row case and was nominated as nonfiction book of the year by both The American Bar Association (the Silver Gavel Award) and the Mystery Writers Association of America (The Edgar). Horne's 2005 reporting from Kobe, Japan, in which he compared that city’s recovery from a devastating 1995 earthquake with post-Katrina New Orleans' prospects for recovery, was honored by the American Planning Association.

He is a 1970 graduate of Harvard University.