Announcement from National Editor Philip Rucker, Deputy National Editor Amy Fiscus, America Editor Cathleen Decker and Deputy America Editor Christine Armario:
We are thrilled to announce that Michelle Boorstein and Casey Parks have joined the National staff from Metro, bringing their deep reporting and expertise to the America team, where they will cover news and enterprise about compelling and consequential national issues.
Michelle, one of the country’s most distinguished religion reporters, will continue to chronicle faith in America, from the rise of religious nationalism to financial, political and sexual misconduct in powerful institutions. She is based in the Washington newsroom.
Casey, an immersive reporter and gifted narrative writer, will continue to cover LGBTQ issues and the accompanying political debates and societal shifts, with a special focus on the transgender community. She is based in Portland, Ore.
Michelle Boorstein
For the past 18 years, Michelle has covered the realms of religion, spirituality and meaning-making. She’s brought to readers’ attention challenges to the separation of church and state and new fascination with nature-based spiritualities like paganism and witchcraft. She’s tried to help them understand festering and confusing divisions in America over the country’s religious identity through profiles of mega-pastor Rick Warren, Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson and Johnnie Moore, who served as evangelical whisperer in the Trump White House.
She broke stories on wealthy Catholic donors spending millions to secretly buy phone app data that identified gay priests and on a Catholic bishop from one of the poorest corners of the country who took hundreds of thousands from his diocese for lavish spending on his home. She also covered a D.C. cardinal who lied about not knowing about sexual misconduct allegations against his famous predecessor.
Michelle’s coverage has taken her across the country and sometimes abroad, notably the Vatican, where she chronicled the history-making retirement of Pope Benedict and the election of Pope Francis. The Religion Newswriters Association awarded Michelle its top honor for big news organizations in 2011, 2013 and 2017. She was also awarded a Nieman Fellowship in journalism in 2016.
Michelle started at The Post in 2002 during a period of rapid expansion on the Metro staff. She opened a bureau in Fredericksburg from which she covered “outside-the-Beltway Virginia.” Before that she worked for the Associated Press in Phoenix, Providence, Nairobi and New York. She has a bachelor’s degree in history and journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a master’s in Near Eastern Studies from New York University.
Casey Parks
Since joining The Post in 2021, Casey, has written evocative stories about the transgender experience, such as a piece on the aftermath of the Mississippi ban on transgender care for minors and another on Morgan Davis, a transgender man and one of four investigators on a Travis County, Tex., unit tasked with reviewing claims of child abuse made against a family with a transgender child. She also was the lead reporter on a poll of transgender Americans published by The Post last year.
Casey joined The Post after 11 years at The Oregonian, where she covered night cops, city government and schools before a long stint covering race and LGBTQ issues. Her story, “The Pact,” about two Tongan teenagers torn between playing college football and serving as a Mormon missionary, was a finalist for the Livingston Award. And her three-part series “About a Boy,” one of the first intimate portrayals of a transitioning teenager, was included in the 2018 Mayborn Best American Newspaper Narratives. Casey’s work also has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Oxford American, ESPN, USA Today and the Nation.
Casey got her first newspaper job when she was 15, manning the circulation desk in the morning before school, and after class working in the newsroom, transcribing messages from a complaint line. Her critically acclaimed book, “Diary of a Misfit,” which is part memoir, part journalistic investigation, won the J Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the Oregon Book Award and the Women’s Way Book Prize.
