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Kevin Fagan is an award-winning journalist and passionate storyteller. He specializes in writing about homelessness and poverty, human interest, crime, breaking news and the American West, taking pleasure in ferreting out stories others might not find — from immersing in street camps of the unhoused to riding the rails with modern-day hobos.
As a veteran reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, Kevin has focused extensively on the gritty culture of street people. Over the past 20-plus years he has produced more than 500 high-impact articles and projects that helped drive city and national policy on homelessness, comparing and examining housing and counseling programs in the Bay Area and throughout the nation. From 2016 to 2021 he led the Chronicle’s annual sweeping “SF Homeless Project,” and in 2003 he spent six months in San Francisco’s streets to produce the influential five-day “Shame of the City” series exploring the then-exploding crisis of homelessness and its possible solutions.
He has witnessed seven prison executions, and covered the Sept. 11 terror attacks at Ground Zero, mass shootings including the Columbine High School massacre, the Occupy movement and aftermath, California droughts, floods and fires. Kevin's interviews have ranged the gamut from presidents and soldiers to comedians, and he's filed dispatches from Laos and the Dominican Republic on murder, guerrilla warfare, land mine danger and drug abuse. Kevin’s ground-breaking 8-part podcast and story package on the unsolved case of the Doodler serial killer, who murdered gay men in San Francisco, was an international hit on the true crime podcast charts, scoring in the top 3 for the U.S. and Britain.
Kevin's national and regional awards include the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism and prizes from National Headliner Awards, Best of the West, California Newspaper Publishers' Association, Society of Professional Journalists, Heywood Broun and the San Francisco Press Club. He received the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship to Stanford University, which allowed him to spend an academic year at the university studying aspects of the American West, and he has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize for stories ranging from homelessness to disaster coverage and feature writing.
-- Photo of Kevin by Brant Ward