Tara Parker-Pope joins The Washington Post as editor of new Wellness Department

Announcement from Executive Editor Sally Buzbee, Managing Editors Cameron Barr and Steven Ginsberg and Managing Editor of Diversity and Inclusion Krissah Thompson:

We are happy to announce that Tara Parker-Pope will join The Washington Post as the editor of a new Wellness Department, hiring a staff of more than 15 journalists and working with colleagues across The Post to create and build out this important coverage area.

Tara and the team will work closely with National’s health and science team, colleagues in Food and other parts of Features, and our visual departments. We believe that consumer-oriented coverage of a wide range of health and wellness topics, strongly based in science and fact-based reporting, is essential for our current and future audiences.

For nearly 15 years, Tara has been a health columnist and the founding editor of Well, the award-winning consumer health section of The New York Times. Last year, she was part of the newsroom team that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the pandemic. In 2013, she won a News and Documentary Emmy for “Life, Interrupted,” a video series about living with cancer in your 20s, for which she was the senior editorial producer. Her story, “Kept from a Dying Partner’s Bedside” prompted President Barack Obama to issue new rules guaranteeing hospital visitation rights for same-sex couples.

Before joining the Times, Tara was a Wall Street Journal reporter for 14 years, working in Dallas, London and New York. She wrote the Health Journal column from 2000 to 2007. She has also been a staff writer at the Houston Chronicle and the Austin American-Statesman. She has written three books, including "For Better: How the Surprising Science of Happy Couples Can Help Your Marriage Succeed".

The daughter of an Air Force pilot, Tara grew up in Arizona, Japan, Taiwan, Texas and Ohio. She has been living in Dallas since January, helping her father recover from the long-term effects of covid-19. In June, she will relocate to the District with her college-age daughter and her 14-year-old Shih Tzu, Maddie, who starred in a recent column about "Dogsomnia." She is a co-founder of East Coast Power Volleyball Club, one of the largest youth volleyball programs in the United States.

Tara starts April 11.