Madeleine Blais

Madeleine Blais (born 1946) is a United States journalist, author and professor in the University of Massachusetts Amherst's journalism department.^[1] As a reporter for The Miami Herald, Blais earned the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1980 for "Zepp's Last Stand",^[2] a story about a self-declared pacifist and subsequently dishonorably discharged World War I veteran. Blais has worked at The Boston Globe (1971–1972), The Trenton Times (1974–1976) and The Miami Herald (1979–1987). She has also published articles in The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Northeast Magazine in the Hartford Courant, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, Nieman Reports, the Detroit Free Press and the San Jose Mercury News.^[1] She is from Amherst, Massachusetts.

Works

• The Heart Is an Instrument: Portraits in Journalism. University of Massachusetts Press. 1992. ISBN 978-0-87023-942-7., which includes profiles of Christine Falling, the Florida babysitter who murdered three children in her care, social activist Carol Fennelly and playwright Tennessee Williams.
• In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-87113-572-8, the story of the Amherst Lady Hurricanes girl's high school basketball team, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in nonfiction
• Uphill Walkers: Portrait of a Family. Grove Press. 2002. ISBN 978-0-8021-3892-7., a memoir of her Irish-American single-parent upbringing
• David Garlock, ed. (2003). "Zepp's Last Stand". Pulitzer Prize feature stories: Americas best writing, 1979-2003. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-8138-2545-8.
• Ellen Sussman, ed. (2007). "The Beard". Bad girls: 26 writers misbehave. W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-06463-6.

Personal

She graduated from The College of New Rochelle in 1969. While there, she roomed with Mercedes Ruehl and Suzanne Hampton. She is married to author John Katzenbach.

References

1. "UMASS Journalism - Full time faculty".
2. "1980 Winners and Finalists". Columbia University.