James Fallows is a long-time writer and broadcaster whose work has won the National Book Award and National Magazine Award. The most recent of his 12 books is Our Towns, coauthored with his wife, Deborah Fallows, which was the basis of a 2021 HBO documentary. They started the Our Towns Civic Foundation to promote storytelling through journalism, mapping, audio, and other ways to increase awareness of local-level innovation in the United States.
Fallows grew up in Redlands, California. He studied American history at Harvard and economics at Oxford. During the Jimmy Carter administration, he served as chief White House speechwriter, the youngest person ever in that job, and his reports for The Atlantic and other publications since the 1970s have included multiyear stints in China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world. He and his wife are now based in Washington, DC.
