Announcement from Wellness Editor Tara Parker-Pope:
I am delighted to announce that Amanda Morris, a trailblazing reporter on the disability beat, is joining The Washington Post’s expanding personal health and wellness team.
In this role, Amanda will write on issues related to disability and chronic illness, which affects a large, underserved and typically misunderstood community of readers. In the United States alone, nearly half the population has been diagnosed with a chronic illness and an estimated 1 in 4 adults is living with some form of disability.
Amanda is uniquely qualified to cover this important beat. She brings passion and empathy to her reporting, which is informed by both her professional experience as a science journalist and her personal identification with the disability community. Amanda describes herself as both a “science fan girl” and a hard-of-hearing woman who has worn hearing aids since the age of 1. She grew up using American Sign Language with her deaf parents.
Before joining The Post, Amanda was the inaugural disability reporting fellow at the New York Times, where she wrote several must-read stories, including how technology and culture are changing American Sign Language, the indignities experienced by airline travelers who use wheelchairs, how home covid tests are inaccessible to blind people, the benefits of remote learning for some disabled students and the future of space travel for people with disabilities.
In an essay, “How to report with care on disability,” she wrote about changing the narrative around disability in the popular press. ”Some of my work dismantles long-held stigmas and negative attitudes that many people have toward disability — such as the flawed idea that having a disability is inherently bad or is limiting,” she wrote.
Amanda was previously a multimedia bioscience reporter for the Arizona Republic, where she answered reader questions through a covid-19 helpline, wrote about the disappearance of important soil organisms in Arizona and used her data journalism and multimedia skills to create a six-part series on stem cell treatments. She has also worked for The Associated Press, NPR and CNN.
Amanda grew up in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. She is a graduate of New York University, where she double majored in media culture and communications and journalism. She enjoys swing dancing and is an avid traveler and hiker who recently completed the Camino de Santiago in Spain and the Salkantay trek to Machu Picchu, Peru.
Please welcome Amanda, whose first day will be Monday, Aug. 22.
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