About the Author

In 28 years at the Washington Post, Kathy covered politics, social issues and the federal government, among other topics. For her final 17 years there, she focused on space science and technology, a path that began when she was assigned to cover the 1986 launch of the shuttle Challenger, which ended in a catastrophe that killed seven astronauts. Her work has also been published in magazines such as National Geographic and Astronomy. Twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, her honors include the David N. Schramm Award for journalism (1999), given by the American Astronomical Society. In 2007, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the nation’s premier scientific advisory body, selected her book, The Rock From Mars: A Detective Story on Two Planets (Random House, 2006) as one of the three best books of the year.  In November 1921, The Rock From Mars was selected as one of “the best books about space” by Stephen P. Maran, a distinguished astronomer and the editor of Astronomy for Dummies, writing for the Shepherd book review site. See https://shepherd.com/best-books/about-space

In order to give readers a visceral sense of the events she writes about, Kathy has made parachute jumps, flown weightless aboard NASA’s “vomit comet” aircraft used to train astronauts, flown through the eye of a killer hurricane aboard a research plane, and is one of the few journalists who has made a deep ocean dive aboard the three-person Alvin submersible vessel, to see oases of strange life thriving on the sunless floor of the Pacific. She holds a (lapsed) private pilot license. Kathy has appeared as a guest on CBS's "Face the Nation," PBS's "Washington Week," and various other news outlets.

Kathy began her journalism career as a feature writer for the Nashville Tennessean (at that time, an independent newspaper more recently bought by the Gannett chain) soon after graduating from Vanderbilt University. In Nashville, she covered the music industry and a wide variety of other subjects. In 1970, she won the National Headliner Award for Best Domestic News Reporting for coverage of the war in Vietnam, East Tennessee chicken catchers and other topics.

 In 1975, she married attorney John Atkisson, who died in 2010.  In 2017, she married former U.S. Congressman Vic Fazio, who died on March 16, 2022.