Biography
Antonia Juhasz is an investigative journalist focused on energy and climate and the author of three books, Black Tide: the Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill, The Tyranny of Oil, and The Bush Agenda. She wrote, “Oil and Water,” in Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas. Her writing appears in Rolling Stone, Harper’s Magazine, Newsweek, The Atlantic, CNN, The Nation, Ms., The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and many other outlets. Her Harper’s Magazine feature on the BP oil spill, “30 Million Gallons Under the Sea,” for which she travelled in the Alvin submarine, appears in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016 Anthology and The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing. She lives in New Orleans.
Research
With the support of the Monroe Fellowship, Antonia Juhasz will conduct research for a book with the working title, Cancer Alley Rises: One Black Community’s Resistance and the Coming End of the Fossil Fuel Era. The focus is Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” and the life and work of Sharon Lavigne featured in Antonia’s Rolling Stone investigation: “Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ is Getting Even More Toxic—but Residents are Fighting Back.” Five generations of Sharon Lavigne’s family have lived in St. James Parish, Louisiana, a community founded by former slaves on the banks of the Mississippi River. Today, her home is situated in the heart of one of America’s worst industrial corridors, site of some 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities stretching from New Orleans to Baton Rouge dubbed “Cancer Alley.” The story of Cancer Alley reveals how environmental racism made the fossil fuel industry possible, and with it, the global climate crisis. But it is also a story of resistance, as the environmental justice movement was born here—a legacy Sharon is carrying boldly forward, part of a growing global climate justice movement. They’re going head-to-head against a fossil fuel industry that is weakened yet refuses to go down without a fight.
