Maureen Dowd

New York Times Columnist & Pulitzer Prize-Winner

Maureen Dowd

New York Times Columnist & Pulitzer Prize-Winner

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Biography

Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times Opinion Pages and a feature writer for The Times’s Styles and Arts & Leisure sections. Ms. Dowd won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, in the commentary category, for her “unsparing columns on the hypocrisies involved in the Lewinsky affair and the effort to impeach President Clinton.” Ms. Dowd was appointed a columnist for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times in January 1995 and has covered ten presidential campaigns. She served as White House correspondent during the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration, gaining a wide following of admirers and imitators for her witty, incisive and acerbic portraits of the powerful.

Ms. Dowd joined The Times as a metropolitan reporter in October 1983. She began her career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for The Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter and feature writer. When The Star closed in 1981, she went to Time magazine.

A 1992 Pulitzer Prize finalist in national reporting for her coverage of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, Ms. Dowd received the Breakthrough Award from Women, Men and Media at Columbia University in 1991 and a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications in 1994. She was named one of Glamour’s Women of the Year for 1996 and won the Damon Runyon Award in 2000 for outstanding contributions to journalism. In 2017, she received the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. In 2024, she received the Excellence in Journalism Award from the American News Women’s Club. She has written three best-selling books — Bushworld, Are Men Necessary? and most recently The Year of Voting Dangerously — plus Good Cop, a short story about her dad, a police officer in the U.S. Senate. Her latest book, Notorious, a captivating collection of her most compelling celebrity profiles, released in March 2025.

Born in Washington, D.C., she received a B.A. degree in English literature from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. in 1973 and honorary doctorates from Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y., and the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. In 2012, she received an honorary doctorate from National University of Ireland, Galway. She received her master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University in 2023.

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An Evening with Maureen Dowd

During her renowned career in journalism, Maureen Dowd has made it her mission to look closer into Washington and the politics game. She has written for major newspapers like the New York Times and has been rewarded for her work with as high an honor as the Pulitzer Prize. When it comes to the election, Dowd is able to provide a unique point of view. She has always looked deeper into the minds of politicians and the inner workings of our nation’s Capital. Maureen Dowd will bring an unbiased, uncensored outlook into any election discussion.

Fit to Print: Writing on Washington

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