Marci McDonald is a Toronto-based journalist who currently serves as a Contributing Editor for Walrus magazine, where her most recent cover story, “Jesus in the House: Is the Religious Right Taking Over Stephen Harper’s Government?” forms the basis for her next book. A former bureau chief for Maclean’s in Paris and Washington who has interviewed Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton, McDonald spent another five years in the American capital as a senior writer for US News & World Report, covering both business and politics, and, coincidentally, the World Trade Centre disaster.

Since beginning her career at the Toronto Star, she has won seven gold National Magazine Awards, including one for “Blind Trust”, her examination of Paul Martin’s shipping empire, which appeared in the first issue of the Walrus and also received the Canadian Association of Journalist’s investigative magazine award in 2003. In Canada, she has been a frequent contributor to Toronto Life and Canadian Geographic, among others, while in the US her features have appeared in the Washington Monthly, the Washington Post Magazine, Editor & Publisher and Redbook, as well as US News. Her work has been included in two anthologies, Canada from the Newsstands: a Selection from the Best Canadian Journalism of the Past Thirty Years, edited by Val Clery (Macmillan of Canada) and The Presence of Excellence: Twenty Five Years of Selections from the National Magazine Awards, edited by Don Obe.

A winner of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy, she produced a five-part series on US-Canadian relations for the Toronto Star which led to her 1995 book, Yankee Doodle Dandy: Brian Mulroney and the American Agenda.

She is also the co-author of Maureen Forrester’s autobiography, Out of Character.

Forthcoming:

Work in progress

Non-Fiction:

Yankee Doodle Dandy:
Brian Mulroney and the American Agenda
(Stoddart, 1995)

Out of Character:
A Memoir
with Maureen Forrester
(McClelland & Stewart, 1986)