Barbara Mahany

Barbara Mahany, once a pediatric oncology nurse, was a staff writer at the Chicago Tribune for nearly thirty years. She has always been drawn to deeply human stories, where she has displayed a nurse’s knack for tapping into the hearts of those whose story she is telling. She counts among her life’s treasures the hundreds of letters she’s received from readers who tell her they’ve clipped one of her stories and tucked it in a wallet, a bedroom drawer, or slipped it in a plastic sleeve and carried it wherever they’ve gone. Since leaving the Tribune in 2012, she’s been working as a freelance journalist and author; her first book, Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door, named a Publisher’s Weekly Top Ten religion books for Fall 2014, has been called “a field guide to your holiest hours.” Her newest title, The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text, is forthcoming in March, 2023. Barbara lives along the shores of Lake Michigan, just north of Chicago, with her husband, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Chicago Tribune architecture critic, Blair Kamin.