UC Santa Cruz humanities alumnus Michael Scherer will join the Washington Post as a national political reporter in September.
Scherer has been TIME magazine’s Washington Bureau Chief since 2013. He first joined TIME in 2007 and was named the magazine’s White House correspondent following the 2008 presidential campaign, traveling to more than a dozen countries with President Obama.
One of the first students in the Creative Writing Program led by literature professors Micah Perks and Karen Yamashita, Scherer graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1998 with a B.A. in Literature. He went on to graduate from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
The author of more than 20 TIME cover stories, Scherer won the National Press Club’s Lee Walczak Award for Political Excellence for his articles on the 2012 Obama re-election effort. He also received the 2014 New York Press Club Award for Political Coverage for a cover story about the 2013 government shutdown.
Before coming to TIME, Scherer worked as a Washington correspondent for both Mother Jones and Salon.com. He began his career as a reporter for the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Scherer has returned to UC Santa Cruz several times as a guest of the Creative Writing Program’s Living Writers Series. In 2014 he participated in a panel of alumni journalists that included Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter, Martha Mendoza, and Washington Post Latin America correspondent, Nick Miroff.
