Sara Catania

Patching A Broken City
Former Berkeley professor Edward J. Blakely brings order to New Orleans' hodgepodge bureaucracy, and urgency to its laissez-faire citizentry.

A is for Afro
For the only white student in class, St. James elementary offered a double major in minority experience.

Death Row Conversion
Traditional opponents of capital punishment have gained powerful and
unlikely allies: American Catholics, many of them conservatives
defending a “culture of life.”

Towers of Power
Simon Rodia's masterwork is inseparable from its site on a dead-end street in Watts. Which is another good reason to stop ignoring it.

Losing Dorothy
If you're black and poor in LA, silence still equals death

It's Not Easy Being Green
Some brilliant -- and bungled-- attempts to save the urban forest

Hey President Obama, Spare Any Change?
Experienced, Independent Journalist Seeks Audacious Opportunity to Earn Living Wage.

Barack Obama is Not My President
Yes, I voted for him, and I'm as taken with his eloquence, determination and historic-ness as anyone. But it is too late in my life for me to claim him as my own.

Beyond Griffith Park
Make L.A.'s Griffith Park a historic-cultural monument. But also give Angelenos more green spaces.

Silver Lake's Golden Opportunity
A new kind of urban park

Trees Torn Limb From Limb
Stop the carnage caused by chain saw operators running amok in LA

Death Row's IQ Divide
States differ on how mentally retarded an inmate has to be to avoid execution

Sara Catania is a contributing op-ed writer for the Los Angeles Times and a blogger for LA Observed and The Huffington Post. She teaches journalism at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, where she is also helping develop an urban ecology track for the Specialized Master's Degree program. She is at work on a book about the legacy of urban renewal on the South Side of Chicago, for which she received a research grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Catania is the recipient of a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford and a Katrina Media Fellowship with the Open Society Institute. She has been a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, the LA Daily News and the LA Weekly. Her work has appeared in (and on) numerous publications and websites including Mother Jones,California, Legal Affairs, salon, Asian Week, New America Media, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine.
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Recent work:Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, LA Observed