Judy Pasternak is a non-fiction writer in Washington DC. For 24 years, she was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, covering topics as varied as al Qaeda's private airline, the impact of gangs on a Watts middle school, a band of bank-robbing right-wing extremists, and the giant black hole at the middle of the Milky Way. Her beats in LA included Malibu, smog and science; she was also a Chicago-based national correspondent for the paper and a member of the national investigative team in DC. Her 2006 series about the environmental devastation wrought by uranium mining on the Navajo homeland won numerous national journalism awards, prompted a Congressional hearing and led to a five-year federal cleanup plan. She expanded that series, framing the story with a four-generation family saga, for her first book. Yellow Dirt won the 2009 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and was selected as one of the Best Books of 2010 by both the Christian Science Monitor and Publishers Weekly.