Striving: Adventures of a Female Journalist in a Man's World, a True Story

Jo Thomas wrote for The New York Times over a period of 26 years, as an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C; chief of the Miami/Caribbean Bureau, a London correspondent, national correspondent, and an assistant national editor, writing for every section of the newspaper: science, business, travel, style, sports, The New York Times Magazine, and the Book Review.

Earlier in her career, she reported for the Detroit Free Press and the Cincinnati Post and Times-Star, where she was the first woman hired in the newsroom in 20 years. She started out as a college graduate and housewife who wanted to write. By 1970, she was the youngest Nieman Fellow accepted at Harvard and one of the first women. In 1974 she was a co-recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for a series "Psychosurgery on Trial."

Jo spent two years investigating the far right in America after the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In 1997, judges in the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Wire Content Committee reviewed the all the stories filed on the day of the verdict in the trial of the bomber, Timothy J. McVeigh, and singled out Jo’s story as a "standout" for the "depth of reporting and level of detail." In 2002, she worked on The New York Times national staff that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for A Nation Challenged."

She is a summa cum laude graduate of Wake Forest University, which gave her a Distinguished Service Citation in 1983. The Society of Professional Journalists in Cincinnati inducted her into their Hall of Fame in 2014, the same year the Irish American Unity Conference established the Jo Thomas Award for Courage in Journalism based on her coverage of events in Northern Ireland. Jo is the mother of two daughters and has three grandchildren.