Deborah Howlett is a journalist and lecturer at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in Journalism and Media Studies and in Digital Communication, Information and Media.
She is the founder of a new collaborative multimedia student journalism project, the NJ State House News Service, which employs interns from NJ colleges and universities to cover state government from Trenton for local media partners across the state.
She has taught reporting, writing, and digital media at the University of Delaware and the University of Pennsylvania, where she also served as the general manager of the Daily Pennsylvanian, the independent student newspaper.
Howlett was a distinguished reporter at USA Today, where she started out covering national breaking news, served as the newspaper’s Midwest bureau chief based in Chicago, and reported internationally. She has written about the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, two Super Bowls, four major hurricanes, nine political conventions, and military conflicts in Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Rwanda. She covered state government for the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., where she was part of a team that won the ABA Silver Gavel award for a series on terrorism and domestic security.
Howlett’s academic interests include digital media; news literacy; and the intersection of gender and race in media, especially in sports. She is currently working on a memoir about growing up genderqueer.
She lives in Pennington, NJ, with her wife, Cindy, and their two college-age children.