MARK STRICHERZ was born in San Francisco in 1970 and raised in the Bay Area. He earned a B.A. in political science from Santa Clara University and an M.A. in the social sciences from the University of Chicago. In between, he worked for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps to redevelop an inner-city neighborhood in Baton Rouge, La. and worked as a literary assistant at America magazine.

After school, he became a newspaper reporter. His stories on a contracting scandal in Brentwood, Ca. led to the resignation of a top city official. He was later hired as a reporter-researcher at the New Republic. He then  covered Congress for States News Service and was a staff writer at Education Week.

His stories have been cited by The Week magazine in August 2003 as among the best in the country and received an honorable mention in 2005 from Washington Independent Writers.  His articles have appeared in many national publications, including the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Weekly Standard, New Republic, Christianity Today, Commonweal, Columbia, and National Catholic Register, The Nation, and National Review Online. To research Why the Democrats are Blue, Mark has won grants from the Phillips Foundation in Washington, D.C. and the LBJ Foundation at the University of Texas in Austin.

He lives in Washington, on Capitol Hill, with his wife, Angy, and their daughter, Grace.

(Photo of author by M. Scott Mahaskey. See his collection of work at www.mahaskey.com)

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