JILL LAWRENCE

Jill Lawrence is a national political correspondent at USA Today. Before joining the newspaper in July 1996, she was a columnist for The Associated Press and a free-lance magazine and newspaper writer. Washingtonian Magazine named Lawrence one of the city’s 50 most influential journalists in its December, 2005 edition. Columbia Journalism Review included her in a September, 2004 list of the top 10 reporters on the presidential campaign trail. Lawrence has covered every presidential campaign since 1988. She won a National Headliner Award in 1995 for AP columns about Washington in the Clinton era. She has written about politics for the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Constitution, the Washington Post Magazine, Humanities Magazine and other publications. She taught journalism at American University in 1997.