Sheryl Gay Stolberg

Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Born	(1961-11-18) November 18, 1961
Alma mater	University of Virginia
Occupation	Journalist
Employer	The New York Times

Sheryl Gay Stolberg (born November 18, 1961) is an American journalist who covers Congress for The New York Times. She is a former White House correspondent, covering Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and shared in two Pulitzer Prizes while at the Los Angeles Times. She has appeared as a political analyst on ABC, PBS, Fox, MSNBC and WNYC. She is a regular contributor to the news program, 1A, syndicated on National Public Radio.

Early life and education

Stolberg was born in 1961 in New York City, the daughter and first child of Irving and Marcia Dawn (Papier) Stolberg. Her father worked in the printing ink industry and her mother was a bookkeeper. She attended John F. Kennedy High School in Bellmore, N.Y. and graduated with a B.A. in Political Science and Government from the University of Virginia in 1983. At Virginia, she was executive editor of The Cavalier Daily, the student newspaper.

Career

Stolberg began her career at The Providence Journal in Providence, R.I., covering local news and police. She joined The Los Angeles Times. in 1997, covering local news, and was soon promoted to the newspaper's Metro desk, where she shared in two Pulitzer Prizes won by that newspaper's staff for spot news reporting: one in 1993 for "balanced, comprehensive, penetrating coverage under deadline pressure of the second, most destructive day of the Los Angeles riots," and one in 1995 for coverage "of the chaos and devastation in the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake" of January 1994. In 1995, she moved to The Los Angeles Times' Washington bureau, as a roving domestic policy reporter.

Stolberg joined The New York Times in 1997 as a Washington correspondent, covering science and health policy. She spent five years writing extensively on bioethics issues, including cloning, the death of a gene therapy patient, embryonic stem cell research and an experimental artificial heart. She switched to writing about US politics in 2002, covering Congress, including the Supreme Court confirmations of Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. She covered the White House from 2006 to 2011, chronicling the end of the George W. Bush presidency and the transition to the historic presidency of Barack Obama. In 2011, Stolberg joined the team covering the 2012 presidential elections, and was a lead author of the Times' "Long Run" series of biographical profiles of Republican presidential candidates, including Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann and Mitt Romney. From mid-2015 to mid-2017 she was the newspaper's Mid-Atlantic Bureau Chief, covering politics, news and features of national interest, including the unrest in Baltimore in the aftermath of the death of Freddie Gray, and the trials of the six police officers charged in his death. She wrote extensively about the key swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania during the 2016 presidential election. In 2017, Stolberg returned to Capitol Hill to chronicle Congress during the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Throughout her two-decade career in Washington, she has profiled dozens of major political and cultural figures, including Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Anthony M. Kennedy, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Valerie Plame, the former spy, and Katharine Weymout h, then publisher of The Washington Post.

Personal

In 1990, Stolberg married the photographer and videographer Scott Robinson, who is the author of the 2005 coffee table picture book, Faces of Nascar. The couple lives in suburban Maryland and has two daughters: Olivia Mae Robinson and Hannah Jane Robinson. Stolberg is a second cousin of the noted artist David Stolberg.

Awards

2009 Gerald Loeb Award for Large Newspapers for "The Reckoning," for an article examining President George W. Bush's role in the mortgage meltdown of 2008.