Lizzie Johnson joined The Washington Post as a staff writer in 2021. She previously worked at The San Francisco Chronicle as an enterprise and investigative reporter, among other publications. Her first book, Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, is about the blaze that leveled the Northern California town of Paradise. It was awarded the highest prize — the Gold Medal for non-fiction — in the 2022 California Book Awards contest and is currently being developed as a feature film by Jamie Lee Curtis’ Comet Pictures and Blumhouse, for which Lizzie will serve as an executive producer.

A three-time finalist for the Livingston Awards, the California News Publishers Association has recognized Lizzie for Best Writing, Best Profile, Best Enterprise, Best Feature and Best Wildfire Feature. In 2021, she won first place for long-form feature writing in the Best of the West contest for a story about a serial arsonist. In 2023, she received the Freedom of the Press Award for her reporting on a Ponzi Scheme that preyed on Mormons — a partnership with The Last Vegas Review-Journal to finish the work of slain reporter Jeff German.

She has appeared on Longform Podcast, This American Life, Longreads, and Climate One from the Commonwealth Club. Her work has been featured by the Columbia Journalism Review, the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Harvard’s Nieman Storyboard. In 2020, Lauren Markham nicely profiled Lizzie’s wildfire coverage, for which Lizzie enrolled in and graduated from a professional firefighting academy. She has reported all across America and from the front lines of the war in Ukraine, driven by a desire to illustrate harm, hold power to account and spread compassion.

Raised in a farming family in the Midwest, she currently lives in Washington, D.C., though she still longs for the mountains and forests of the West.

Photo by Bill O’Leary