As The Washington Post’s national environmental reporter, Juliet Eilperin first slipped into the water with sharks in the spring of 2005, when she visited researchers at the Bimini Biological Laboratory (commonly known as “The Shark Lab”) in the Bahamas. After becoming fascinated with these ancient creatures—as well as the new discoveries scientists have been making about how they travel, feed and reproduce—Ms. Eilperin began a worldwide pursuit of sharks and the people whose lives have become inextricably linked to them over the years. This quest took her to both of Mexico’s coasts, as well as to a tiny village in Papua New Guinea, influential trading centers such as Hong Kong and Shanghai, a remote archipelago in Indonesia and the surfing mecca off Cape Town.
When she was not spending time with fearsome ocean predators, Ms. Eilperin has covered issues ranging from climate change to the 2008 presidential campaign for the Post. She launched the paper’s Post Carbon blog in December 2009, and in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon explosion in April 2010, she wrote several investigative pieces exposing the lack of federal oversight over offshore drilling. Her environmental reporting assignments have entailed trekking on the Arctic tundra with Selma Hayek and Jake Gyllenhaal and searching on her hands and knees for rare insects in the caves of Tennessee. Ms. Eilperin has received numerous environmental fellowships and honors, including the 2011 Blue Frontier Campaign-Peter Benchley Award for media coverage of ocean issues.
In the spring of 2006 Rowman & Littlefield published her first book, “Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives, which has been featured on NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” Ms. Eilperin has just completed “Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks,” to be published in June 2011 by Pantheon. She is also a contributor to “The Princeton Reader: Contemporary Essays by Writers and Journalists at Princeton University” and “Deadlock: The Inside Story of America’s Closest Election.”
A born-and-bred Washingtonian, Juliet Eilperin graduated in 1992 magna cum laude from Princeton University, where she received a bachelor’s in Politics with a certificate in Latin American Studies. She has worked for the Post since March 1998, starting as its House of Representatives reporter before switching to the environment beat in April 2004.
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