Author

Kim Cross

@KimHCross

Kim Cross a full-time freelance writer and author of "What Stands in a Storm," a New York Times best-selling account of the biggest tornado outbreak on record. She loves meticulously reported literary nonfiction and discovering narrative craft in unexpected places.

Gifts for reporters and writers!

Gifts for reporters and writers!

Just in time for the holidays — or any day — journalist and author Kim Cross shares her must-have reporting and writing tools
December 13, 2023
What stacking wood can teach us about structuring stories

What stacking wood can teach us about structuring stories

Author and wood-splitter Kim Cross tackles a mountain of firewood, which helps her work through the mountainous first draft of a story
September 7, 2022
How a top explanatory reporter does emotional interviews: With empathy

How a top explanatory reporter does emotional interviews: With empathy

Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Yong of The Atlantic takes the same open approach with COVID scientists and frontline nurses
September 29, 2021
A profile of one place that echoes all places

A profile of one place that echoes all places

Some writing comes together bit by bit, a mosaic of thoughts and observations gathered over days or months or years. Slowly or suddenly, a bigger picture emerges through a confluence…
November 12, 2020
Narrative of Oregon town’s hellish wildfire experience is a lesson in deadline writing

Narrative of Oregon town’s hellish wildfire experience is a lesson in deadline writing

This past Labor Day, three reporters in Salem, Oregon were enjoying the holiday weekend. They’d done a good job preparing stories in advance so they wouldn’t have to scramble the…
September 29, 2020
A Writer's Survival Guide: Tips for defying distraction

A Writer’s Survival Guide: Tips for defying distraction

The first year I had to work from home, it was dictated by a crisis.During a weekend visit with me and my family, my mother contracted bacterial meningitis and nearly…
April 23, 2020
Deadline writing when the world is in chaos, your house is imploding and kids are home from school

Deadline writing when the world is in chaos, your house is imploding and kids are home from school

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay first appeared in The Cabin, a center for writers in Idaho. It is used with permission. Also, read Kim Cross’s Writer’s Survival Guide: Tips for defying…
April 22, 2020
A writer channels her own life of fear to report about science and psychology

A writer channels her own life of fear to report about science and psychology

Canadian freelancer Eva Holland didn’t just report her debut nonfiction book, “Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear.” She lived it. For the book, she plummets out of an airplane,…
March 31, 2020
"Life is too short to write something boring."

“Life is too short to write something boring.”

A conversation with Los Angeles native and magazine journalist Mary Melton, who profiled a famous photographer in 36 exposures, as in a roll of film
September 26, 2019
Reclaiming history with jars of dirt, and building stories from the ground up

Reclaiming history with jars of dirt, and building stories from the ground up

EDITOR’S NOTE: Four hundred years ago, a Portugueses ship landed at a port in Virginia. Its cargo was “20 and odd” humans — the survivors of a horrendous crossing from…
August 23, 2019