Katherine Roth Kono was a longtime correspondent and editor at the Associated Press, covering sustainability, homes and gardens, design and travel. Her focus has long been on cultural deep-dives and finding ways to bridge cultural chasms by focusing on our shared humanity.
She began her writing career in Paris, where she worked for Reuters and Radio France Internationale, before heading to Cairo on a journalism fellowship from the National Council on US-Arab Relations, after which she stayed on as a reporter. One of her most widely read feature stories while at Reuters was about a soft-spoken, seemingly stateless man who lived for years in Charles de Gaulle Airport. The story later evolved into the film The Terminal.
Katherine was reporting from Cairo when she noticed that the Islamists she met were not like the caricatures her editors imagined, and that the new iteration of Islamism warranted further exploration. During her ICWA fellowship, from 1993 to 1995, she explored Islamic movements in Algeria, Yemen and elsewhere. She had the good fortune to meet Jamal Khashoggi, who mentored her on the huge range of Islamic ideologies, from mystical Sufism to young trainees in Osama bin Laden’s training camps. She later covered the front lines of the Yemeni civil war for Agence France-Presse before joining the Associated Press, covering everything from Muslim communities in the city to the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and its aftermath.
Katherine studied creative writing at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, with minors in French and African Studies. She spent a year in Dakar, Senegal, studying Wolof, before earning master’s degrees in journalism and African studies at the University of Illinois. She now divides her time between New York and Japan, where her focus has again turned to questions of tradition and modernity, and of insiders and outsiders.