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Elizabeth H. McGowan is an award-winning energy and environment reporter based in Washington, D.C. since 2001. Now a freelancer, her main focus since 2019 has been covering Virginia’s transition to clean energy for the Energy News Network. As a staff writer for startup Inside Climate News, her groundbreaking dispatches from Kalamazoo, Michigan, “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You Never Heard Of,” earned her team a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2013. An e-book version of the narrative won the Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists.
McGowan’s freelance articles have appeared in Grist, Blue Ridge Outdoors Magazine, Yale Environment 360, A.T. Journeys and multiple other publications. For the last year, she has written reviews of nature and health books for the Washington Independent Review of Books. McGowan began her journalism career at daily newspapers in Vermont and Wisconsin. Her adventure memoir, “Outpedaling ‘The Big C’: My Healing Cycle Across America” was published in 2020 by Bancroft Press. For her Fellowship project, McGowan will explore how two Virginia cities — Richmond and Norfolk — are using federal planning grants to reconnect Black neighborhoods long isolated by interstate highway projects.
