Karen Tumulty

Who is Karen Tumulty?

Karen Tumulty is a national political correspondent for The Washington Post. Before joining the Post, Tumulty wrote for Time from October 1994 to April 2010. She was a Congressional correspondent as well as the National Political Correspondent based in Washington D.C. for the magazine.

Tumulty graduated from David Crockett High School in Austin, Texas in May 1973. She later graduated in 1977 from the University of Texas at Austin with a BA in Journalism with high honors; she is an alumna of the Alpha Xi Delta sorority. She received an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1981.

Tumulty is a native of San Antonio, Texas, where she began her career at the now-defunct San Antonio Light. Tumulty spent 14 years with the Los Angeles Times, covering the US Congress, economics, business, energy, and general-assignment beats. While at the Times, she won the Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business and financial journalism in 1982, and the National Press Foundation's Edwin Hood Award for diplomatic correspondence in 1993.

Tumulty joined Time in 1994. She covered Congress for two years, during which time she reported and wrote the magazine's 1995 "Man of the Year" profile of Newt Gingrich. In 1996, she became a White House Correspondent, writing major stories on President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton. She became the National Political Correspondent in 2001.