Ann Banks

Ann Banks is a journalist and writer living in New York. She has written for many publications, including Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Magazine, the Washington Post, The Nation, Mother Jones, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and USA Today, where she served as a member of the Board of Contributors. She also wrote a regular column in Parents, Parenting and Boston Magazine. A selection of her essays can be found at annbanks.com

Her travel writing has appeared in Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue, Arthur Frommer Budget Travel, The New York Times, Vogue, Parents and gonomad.com. One of her essays is included in the Travelers' Tales anthology Family Travel: The Farther You Go, the Closer You Get. She is a contributing writer for the website Travel Intelligence.

She edited two anthologies of oral histories from the Federal Writers Project, First-Person America and Harlem Document, and co-produced "Voices from the Thirties," a radio series for National Public Radio on the same subject. Her research on the Federal Writers’ Project was supported by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She received a fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation to write about military families.

She has published eight books for children, including the best-selling Goodbye, House.

She has taught writing at Boston College, the New School for Social Research, and the School of Visual Arts and was on the faculty of the New Orleans and Nashville writers’ conferences. She is a board member and former president of the Writers Room, a writers colony in New York City. She also is on the board of the Coney Island History Project, and has served on the membership committee of PEN USA and as a judge for the National Book Awards.