Vanden Heuvel, Katrina

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, is a political journalist who has spent most of her 30-year career working for the Nation, where she began as an intern.

A self-described liberal, vanden Heuvel is a frequent political commentator on television news shows, appearing on MSNBC, CNN, and PBS, and writer for national publications such as the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Boston Globe. She is the cofounder of Vyi I myi, a Russian-language feminist newsletter that she coedited for many years, and she has written and edited several books.

Vanden Heuvel grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with politics and entertainment as her birthright. She was born October 7, 1959, in New York City to lawyer, author, and politician William vanden Heuvel and author and editor Jean Stein, daughter of the founder of MCA Entertainment, Jules Stein. Her sister, Wendy vanden Heuvel, is an actress who teaches theater in New York.

Vanden Heuvel attended the preparatory Trinity School (now Trinity Pawling) and Princeton University. In college, she interned at the National Lampoon, published a New York Times op-ed about energy independence, and took a year off to intern at the Nation. After graduating summa cum laude from Princeton in 1981, she worked for two years as a production assistant at ABC television. She then returned to the Nation as an assistant editor and has worked there ever since, becoming acting editor in 1994, editor-in-chief in 1995, and publisher in 2005. Vanden Heuvel was among a group of investors, including Paul Newman, E. L. Doctorow, and the Nation's former editor-in-chief, Victor Navasky, to purchase the Nation in 1995.

[Page 1511]In 1988, vanden Heuvel married Stephen Cohen, who, at the time, was a professor of politics and director of Russian studies at Princeton University and today is a Russian history professor at New York University. The couple lived in Russia for several months each year from 1985 until 1991, the year their daughter, Nika, was born. In addition to her daughter, vanden Heuvel also has, from Cohen's previous marriage, two stepchildren and several stepgrandchildren.

Vanden Heuvel belongs to the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on boards for the Correctional Association of New York, the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Institute for Women's Policy Research, and the World Policy Institute. She has been recognized for her public service by the Association for American-Russian Women, the Correctional Association, and the Liberty Hill Foundation. In addition, she has received the following awards for her work as a political journalist: the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee's Voices of Peace Award, New York Civil Liberties Union's Callaway Prize for the Defense of the Right of Privacy, New York University's Olive Branch Award, and Planned Parenthood's Maggie Award.