Katrina vanden Heuvel (; born October 7, 1959), is the editor, publisher, and part-owner of the magazine The Nation. She has been the magazine's editor since 1995. She is a frequent guest on numerous television programs. Vanden Heuvel is a self-described liberal and a progressive.
Vanden Heuvel was born in New York City, New York, the daughter of Jean Stein, a best-selling author and editor of the literary journal Grand Street, and William vanden Heuvel, an attorney, former US ambassador, member of John F. Kennedy's administration, businessman, and author. She has one sister and two step-siblings. Her maternal grandparents were Music Corporation of America founder Jules C. Stein and Doris Babbette Jones (originally Jonas). Through her maternal grandmother, vanden Heuvel is a distant cousin of actor/comedian George Jessel.
Vanden Heuvel graduated from Trinity School in 1977. Vanden Heuvel studied politics and history at Princeton University, writing her senior thesis on McCarthyism and serving as editor-in-chief of The Nassau Weekly. She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1981.
During her undergraduate years at Princeton, she served as editor of the Nassau Weekly, a school publication, and had an internship at National Lampoon magazine in 1978." She also worked as a production assistant at ABC Television. According to a Princeton alumni publication, during her junior year, she had already worked "as a The Nation intern for nine months after taking the 'Politics and the Press' course taught by Blair Clark, the magazine's editor from 1976 to 1978" and "returned to The Nation in 1984 as assistant editor for foreign affairs".
As an owner of The Nation, she is one of a group of investors brought together in 1995 by then-editor Victor Navasky in a for-profit partnership to buy the magazine ... then losing US $500,000 a year more ... from investment banker Arthur L. Carter. This group of investors included, among others, actor Paul Newman, novelist E.L. Doctorow, former Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Alan Sagner, and Peter Norton, creator of the Norton Utilities software.
In 1989, vanden Heuvel was promoted to The Nation's editor-at-large position, responsible for its coverage of the USSR. In 1990, she co-founded Vyi i Myi ("You and We"), a quarterly feminist journal linking American and Russian women. In 1995, vanden Heuvel was made editor of The Nation.
Vanden Heuvel's blog at The Nation( thenation.com) is called "Editor's Cut". She also writes a column for the Washington Post op-ed page.
She is the co-editor of Taking Back America...And Taking Down The Radical Right (Nation Books, 2004) and, most recently, editor of The Dictionary of Republicanisms, (Nation Books, 2005). She is also co-editor (with Stephen F. Cohen) of Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev's Reformers (Norton, 1989) and editor of The Nation: 1865-1990, and the collection A Just Response: The Nation on Terrorism, Democracy and September 11, 2001.
She is a frequent commentator on American and international politics on ABC's "This Week,",and also on MSNBC, CNN and PBS. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Boston Globe.
In 1988, vanden Heuvel married New York University Russian Studies Professor Stephen F. Cohen, a writer on the Soviet Union. They have one daughter Nicola, born in 1991. The family resides in the Upper West Side section of the Manhattan borough of New York City.
Vanden Heuvel is a recipient of Planned Parenthood's Maggie Award for her 2003 article, "Right-to-Lifers Hit Russia," a report on the anti-abortion movement in that country. The special issue she conceived and edited, "Gorbachev's Soviet Union", was awarded New York University's 1988 Olive Branch Award. Vanden Heuvel was also co-editor of Vyi i Myi, a Russian-language feminist newsletter.
Vanden Heuvel has received awards for public service from numerous groups, including the Liberty Hill Foundation, the Correctional Association and the Association for American-Russian Women. In 2003, she received the New York Civil Liberties Union's Callaway Prize for the Defense of the Right of Privacy. She was the recipient of the American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee's 2003 "Voices of Peace" award. Vanden Heuvel is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She also serves on the board of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, the Institute for Policy Studies, the World Policy Institute, the Correctional Association of New York, and the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.
In 2010, Exceptional Women in Publishing , formerly Women in Periodical Publishing, presented Taylor its fifth annual Exceptional Woman in Publishing award.
Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev's Reformers 1990, co-authored with Stephen F. Cohen (ISBN 0-393-30735-2)
A Just Response: The Nation on Terrorism, Democracy, and September 11, 2001 2002, edited by Katrina vanden Heuvel (ISBN 1-56025-400-9)
Taking Back America: And Taking Down the Radical Right 2004, edited by Katrina vanden Heuvel and Robert Borosage (ISBN 1-56025-583-8)
Dictionary of Republicanisms: The Indispensable Guide to What They Really Mean When They Say What They Think You Want to Hear 2005 (ISBN 1-56025-789-X)
