Peggy Simpson

Bio:

Peggy Simpson reported 17 years for the Associated Press starting in 1962 in Dallas, where she covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, including being an eyewitness in the Dallas jail to the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. She transferred to the Washington AP bureau in 1968, covering Congress, and invented an AP beat on the emerging women’s political movement. In 1975, Simpson covered the United Nations Conference on Women in Mexico City. She was a plaintiff in the gender and racial discrimination lawsuit against the AP. She won a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and left the AP in 1979 to cover national politics for the Boston Herald and, later, national economic issues for Hearst Newspapers for five years. She opened a Washington bureau for Ms. Magazine to cover politics and economics. In 1990, she moved to Indiana University as an adjunct professor and then as a journalist in residence. As a freelancer during the 1990s, she reported on Eastern Europe’s transition from communism to a Democratic market economy. For the past decade, she has been active in the emerging national Village movement, helping found Dupont Circle Village and serving as secretary of the national board of the umbrella group, the Village to Village Network. She is a freelance writer in Washington.