Judith Matloff

Judith Matloff (born March 25, 1958) is an American writer, journalism professor and media safety advocate. Her books are How to Drag a Body and Other Safety Tips You Hope to Never Need, No Friends but the Mountains (2017), Home Girl (2008), and Fragments of a Forgotten War (1997).

She teaches conflict reporting at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and previously served as the Africa and Moscow bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The Economist, the Financial Times, Newsweek, the Sunday Telegraph, the Dallas Morning News and Columbia Journalism Review, among other places.

Early life and education Judith Matloff was born in New York City to social workers Lawrence and Hildegarde Matloff. Lawrence eventually became an executive director of the Y.M.-Y.W.H.A. of Greater Flushing and executive vice president of Selfhelp Community Services, an agency for older people in the city founded to help victims of Nazi Germany who settled in the U.S. Educated at Hunter College High School, Judith attended Harvard-Radcliffe College, writing for The Harvard Crimson and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1981. She has one sister.

Career She began her career reporting for UPI and the Mexico City News in the early 1980s. Writing mainly about areas of turmoil abroad, Matloff then served as a staff foreign correspondent for two decades, for various bureaus for Reuters and then as the Africa and Moscow bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, among others.

Matloff has pioneered safety training for journalists around the world. the State Department, UT Austin's Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, DCTV, Mexico-based human rights group Cencos, BRITDOC, and the Canadian Association of Journalists.

Home Girl: Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block In 2008, she published a memoir about starting a family after her return to New York in a fixer-upper brownstone in West Harlem. The purchase of the building was an impulse buy—it turns out to have once been a crack house and that the street is controlled by a narcotics dealer—and she and her husband must charm lax construction workers, bold drug dealers and strange neighbors in one of the country's biggest drug zones. Matloff focuses not on herself or even the house, but, as the Kirkus Reviews says "her thrilling, problem-plagued neighborhood, colorfully portrayed in terms that are neither frightened nor naive." The book received mainly positive reviews, with the Library Journal and Rocky Mountain News praising Matloff's storytelling skills, the Tucson Citizen calling the book "hugely entertaining."

How to Drag a Body and Other Safety Tips You Hope to Never Need In her 2020 book, Matloff gives practical advice earned from her years of experience on everything from constructing a bunker to preventing bank fraud to staying clean in a shelter. The humorously written book received praise from Booklist and Bust magazine with the former calling it "a sobering, useful guide to dealing with ever-more prevalent problems." The writer Gretchen Rubin wrote of it, "extremely practical, laugh-out-loud funny, and somehow very comforting." while Sebastian Junger wrote "If you’re going to read one book to prepare for the unthinkable, read this one." The South Asian Journalists Association, 2008, for articles on the Kashmiri for Time and the Christian Science Monitor Media fellowship, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 2008 Fulbright Scholar to Mexico, 2013–14 Logan Nonfiction Fellowship, 2020, to write How To Drag a Body and Other Safety Tips You Hope To Never Need

Associations PEN America Authors United

Family Matloff's grandparents came to the US to flee the pogroms of Russia. Her uncle, Maurice, was chief historian of the US Army from 1970 to 1981 and author of Strategic Planning and Coalition Warfare and co-author of American Military History.

Books How to Drag a Body and Other Safety Tips You Hope to Never Need: Survival Tricks for Hacking, Hurricanes, and Hazards Life Might Throw at You(HarperCollins, 2020) The War Is in the Mountains: Violence in the World's High Places (Basic Books, 2017) Home Girl: Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block (Random House, 2008) Fragments of a Forgotten War (Penguin, South Africa, 1997)