Maria Karagianis' Bio

Maria Karagianis, who most recently served as a guest editor on the editorial board of the Boston Globe from 2014-2016, began her career as a reporter for the Boston Globe in the early 1970s. Part of a team that covered the violence in Boston caused by a federal court order to de-segregate the public schools, Karagianis was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize gold medal in 1975. The following year, her editor sent her to South Africa for a year, where she covered apartheid, traveled throughout Africa and reported on the civil war in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia). Returning home, she covered Congress, the Massachusetts State House and many other assignments before leaving the Globe the first time after 15 years of service. Karagianis was accepted at the Harvard Divinity School in 1990 and was awarded a master’s degree in world religion in 1993, along with a Pfeiffer fellowship at Harvard to study ancient and modern religion for five weeks in Greece and Turkey. Ten years after graduating, Karagianis was awarded the First Decade Award by Harvard Divinity School, citing her as an outstanding graduate of her class for her role in founding Discovering Justice, a non-profit based in the US Courthouse in Boston that teaches civics and democracy to children and young adults, many of them from disadvantaged neighborhoods. Karagianis, who has taught writing and journalism as an adjunct professor at Boston University, Northeastern University, Emerson College and Clark University, is also a Woodrow Wilson Visiting fellow who travels once or twice a year for a week at a time to colleges as a visiting scholar. Currently, she divides her time between writing, speaking and consulting. Her most recent writing/speaking assignment involved traveling to the Greek island of Lesbos (she is a Greek speaker) and spending time inside Moria, which (ironically) the New York Times featured today on its front page as probably the worst refugee camp in the world.

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