Cheryl L. Reed
Born:
Pen Name: None Connection to Illinois: Reed lived in Chicago and was a metropolitan staff reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. Biography: Cheryl L. Reed is an author, journalist, and professor. She's been a staff reporter and editor at a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Chicago Sun-Times. Her reporting has won several investigative reporting awards, including the Harvard Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. After leaving full-time journalism, she ran communications for the University of Chicago's hospitals and the University's poverty center. Then she taught writing and journalism in a number of universities, most recently at Syracuse University. For several years, she's focused on reporting about media repression in post-Soviet states. From 2016-2017, she was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Kyiv, Ukraine teaching investigative reporting. In the fall of 2019, she returned to Ukraine as a Fulbright Specialist. In 2022, she was a Fulbright Scholar in post-Soviet Central Asia. And most recently, she ran communications for the Ukraine unit at USAID. As an author, she has shadowed dark and mysterious characters—from cops to murder suspects, cloistered nuns to girls doing drugs. Her second novel, Map of My Escape, is a suspense about a school shooting survivor turned anti-gun activist who accidentally shoots a Chicago cop and flees to an island in northern Michigan where she eludes her trackers by using old school methods in a digital age. Reed’s debut novel, Poison Girls, is a thriller about girls from Chicago’s political families playing a deadly game involving opioids. Poison Girls won the Chicago Writers’ Association Book of the Year Award. Reed’s book of nonfiction, Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns, chronicles her bizarre journey of living with religious women in convents off and on for four years. She currently splits her time between the Northern Neck of Virginia and Washington, D.C.
Awards:
- Poison Girls Winner, Book of the Year for Traditional Fiction, 2018
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cheryllynnreed/
Web: https://www.cherylreed.com/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheryl_Reed
Selected Titles
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Map Of My Escape ISBN: 1960018175 OCLC: Running Wild Press 2024 Anti-gun activist Riley Keene and Chicago cop Reece Taylor survived a school shooting together. When Riley accidentally shoots Reece thirteen years later, an incident captured on film by an extortionist, she flees to a remote island. Riley’ s secret lover, Chicago politician Finn O’ Farrell, races to track her down before the extortionist and a corrupt police lieutenant find her. Meanwhile, the media are closing in on Finn about his mysterious role in that long-ago school shooting. |
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Poison Girls ISBN: 057834226X OCLC: Chesapeake Bay Press 2022 It's the summer of 2008. Chicago's Hyde Park Senator is running for the White House, the city is vying to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, and "poison," a lethal form of heroin, has killed more than 250 people, including dozens of suburban girls from prominent families. Natalie Delaney, a crime reporter from the Chicago Times, discovers that daughters of Democratic powerhouses are the real targets. Obsessed with finding who is behind the killings, Natalie becomes entangled in an underworld where drugs, cops, gangs, politics, and privilege collide. Risking everything, this reporter becomes the story... |
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Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns ISBN: 9781101185728 OCLC: 656962550 Berkley Books, New York : 2010. For Unveiled, reporter Cheryl Reed interviewed more than 300 nuns of diverse beliefs, lifestyles, and orders. She lived and prayed with them, witnessed their vows, mourned and celebrated with them, and asked questions no one had ever dared before: about love and sex, life and death, faith and joy, and loss and regret. In the process, Reed would discover more about motherhood, relationships, faith, and feminism than she ever gleaned from the outside world. |