About

Katherine Poythress is the education reporter-host for Honolulu Civil Beat.

She was formerly a staff writer for The Gadsden Times located in northeastern Alabama, where she earned two first-place awards for an in-depth feature project on homelessness. Her beats included the Rainbow City and Southside municipalities, Gadsden city schools, non-profit organizations, features and any enterprise projects she could squeeze in.

She holds a B.A. in English from Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Mich., where she was an active member of the Herbert H. Dow Journalism Program. She started out at her campus paper, the Hillsdale Collegian, timidly and self-consciously writing movie reviews, and graduated into a full-fledged reporting position after one year and much encouragement from her editors. She subsequently held the titles of senior reporter, copy editor and mentor.

Her career began in earnest when as a college junior she broke an investigative story that rocked the college sports department and garnered an award from the Michigan Press Association.

In summer 2007, Katherine interned as a staff writer for Cybercast News Service in Alexandria, Va. She focused her efforts on investigative journalism, though her hard news pieces were frequently the most-read stories of the week. She received numerous requests to appear on several national network television and radio shows to discuss her investigations.

After her 2008 graduation, she served as a reporter in the Sylacauga, Ala. bureau of The Daily Home, covering Talladega and St. Clair counties in eastern Alabama.

Her most important beat there turned out to be a publicly funded mental health board, after she produced several pieces that exposed deeply rooted local political corruption and resulted in the resignations of a renegade board director and several board members.

She, along with other Daily Home staff, received an award for Community Journalism in the 2008 Associated Press Managing Editors contest for a series on the issues of school dropouts and after-school programs.

Since she began her first journal at the age of 9, Katherine has been an insatiable writer and enjoys applying her skills to reporting and reviewing current events. She has a passion for hyperlocal news coverage and for what many term "watchdog journalism."

She is originally from Birmingham, Ala. and is the second oldest of eight children.

Her favorite hobbies (in no particular order) include reading, writing, running, photography, playing drums and piano, Frisbee, drinking coffee, cooking, browsing the dictionary, analyzing people, Sudoku, playing Scrabble and WordTwist online, collecting T-shirts she never wears, dabbling in interior design, reading children's books, playing with her brothers and (yes) cleaning.