Jonathan Myerson Katz

I've spent the last twenty years as a professional journalist, reporting from Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, and the Middle East, and from across the United States. My byline has appeared everywhere from front pages of the New York Times to the features section of Smithsonian Magazine. I spent eight years as a correspondent for the Associated Press.

My main focus these days is my new book, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler and the Marines Who Made America's Empire. It's a look at the wars that made the U.S. a global power, through the eyes of an antihero who participated in all of them, then became a critic of them. To pull this off, my research so far has taken me to China, the Philippines, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Panama, Nicaragua, and Guantánamo Bay, as well as archives from coast to coast.

My first book, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, was a PEN Literary Award Finalist. It also won the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award for the year's best book on international affairs. It built on my years as the AP correspondent in Haiti, which included surviving the 2010 earthquake and revealing that United Nations peacekeepers were responsible for introducing a deadly post-quake cholera epidemic.

In the meantime, I am working as an independent journalist covering the insanity of today for a variety of publications, my Substack newsletter, and on Twitter @KatzOnEarth. By joining my Patreon community, you support all my work, enabling me to keep doing what I do, without fear or favor. Thank you.