Award-winning reporter Casey Parks covers LGBTQ+ issues for The Washington Post, where she has written about the impact of anti-trans legislation, gender-affirming care and abortion access, and the national child-care crisis.

“What I like to do as a journalist is to understand people’s deeply held beliefs, and understand how they shape them into who they are…what the daily negotiations are that people make, where did they try, where did they fail, where did they do the best they could.”

—Casey Parks

Her front-page reporting has taken her to Wisconsin as child-care workers lobby for increased state funding, Colorado to profile transgender state representative Brianna Titone, and between Mississippi and Alabama as a mother drives her teen son across state lines to fill his testosterone prescription (“After Mississippi banned his hormone shots, an 8-hour journey,” featured as a Deep Read, the Post’s best immersive reporting and narrative writing).

Parks’ debut book Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and Mystery was named a best book of 2022 by The Washington Post, Kirkus, Booklist, Boston Globe and others. The story of her life-changing investigation to unravel the mystery of Roy Hudgins, a small-town country singer from her grandmother’s youth, Diary is “a fascinating, engrossing tale about identity and belonging” (Booklist, starred review). In 2002, Parks came out as a lesbian while in college, facing rejection from her family and pastor—who asked God to kill her—and assuming her life in the South was over. But Parks’ grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, pulled her aside and revealed a startling secret: “I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man,” and implored Parks to find out what happened to him. For ten years, Parks traveled to her grandmother’s hometown in rural Louisiana, knocking on strangers’ doors, digging through nursing home records and studying microfiche in small-town libraries trying to uncover the mysteries of Roy’s life: a rumored childhood kidnapping, mysterious final years, fiercely-protected diaries—and persistent questions about how he grappled with his sense of otherness.

“Parks’ facility as a vivid storyteller comes as no surprise. Readers familiar with her work…know her as a thoughtful, precise journalist who communicates her characters’ humanity and the stakes of a story through evocative details.”

—The Washington Post

Winner of the 2021 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award from the Columbia School of Journalism and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, Diary of a Misfit is Parks’ effort to answer her grandmother’s questions about what became of Roy, and her own attempt to find her place in the world. “I kept digging into Roy’s life hoping some stray fact might reveal something to me,” Parks writes. “I didn’t want to die feeling as if I’d never fit anywhere.” She reckons with her own sexuality, her fraught Southern identity, her tortured yet loving relationship with her mother, and the complicated role of faith in her life. Praising the book as a “moving, empowering, searching tale,” Oprah Daily asserts, “Parks has written a memoir that will serve as a beacon for many others still yearning to no longer feel like misfits.”

Parks spent a decade as a staff reporter at The Oregonian, where she wrote about race and LGBTQ+ issues and was a finalist for the Livingston Award. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Oxford American, ESPN, USA Today, and The Nation. Parks’ stories have won the Deadline Club Award, Front Page Award, National Headliner Award, and multiple Society for Features Journalism awards. A graduate of Millsaps College and a former Spencer Fellow at Columbia University, Parks lives in Portland, Oregon.

For more information on Casey Parks, please visit her at caseyparks.com, or explore her page on The Washington Post.