Emily Wax
Fellow, Better Life Lab
Emily Wax worked at The Washington Post for 27 years, where she was an award-winning foreign correspondent in Africa and India. She was drawn to stories of how ordinary people struggled to live their daily lives. She profiled college students struggling to stay alive amid Congo’s civil war, and the use of rape as a weapon in Sudan’s war in the Darfur region.
More recently, she was a caregiver to her husband, who passed away after a seven-year battle with cancer, which left their two young children without a father. Drawing from this experience, she will write about a shaky U.S. hospice system undergoing a crisis in deep funding cuts and roiled by debate about its role at the end of life.
As a Story Fellow, she will report on new and successful approaches to hospice and end-of-life care, which could become models for families struggling through one of the most painful, understudied, and taboo periods in American life.