Biography
Maryn McKenna is an independent journalist who specializes in public health, global health, and food policy. She is a columnist for WIRED, a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University, and the author of the 2017 bestseller BIG CHICKEN: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats. This book (published in the UK and other territories under the title Plucked) received the 2018 Science in Society Award and was named a best book of 2017 by Amazon, Smithsonian, Science News, Wired, Civil Eats, and other publications. Her earlier award-winning books are Superbug and Beating Back the Devil. McKenna is one of the stars of the 2014 documentary Resistance, and her 2015 TED Talk, “What do we do when antibiotics don’t work any more?” has been viewed 1.7 million times and translated into 34 languages. She writes for The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Mother Jones, Newsweek, NPR, Smithsonian, Scientific American, Slate, The Atlantic, Nature, and The Guardian, among other publications. She was a 2018 Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale University and received the 2019 McGovern Award from the American Medical Writing Association, the 2014 Leadership Award from the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics and the 2013 Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Life Sciences.
