About me

I’m Katrina Alcorn. This is my blog. My first book, Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink will be published in September 2013 with Seal Press. I hope you will read it.

If you’re wondering why a busy mom bothers with this silly blog stuff, you might want to read my first post. And then, you might want to read this one.

My first career was in journalism. I wrote for newspapers and magazines in California and Hawaii (including The San Francisco Chronicle, Honolulu Advertiser, and HONOLULU Magazine). I also worked as an associate producer for a PBS documentary series called “Livelyhood,” which took a humorous look at the changing nature of work.

I earned my masters degree in journalism from UC Berkeley in 1999. While I was there, I won a small human rights grant to produce an independent, half-hour documentary about orphans in Cambodia called “The Mystery of Rath Pohl,” which aired on several PBS stations including KTEH San Jose, WHYY Philadelphia, WNET New York, and KBPS San Diego.

In the late 90s, I started working for a web startup as a content strategist (an inscrutable Internet title for ‘writer/editor’) and spent the next ten years at the epicenter of the Internet industry, through the boom, the bust, and the remarkable Web 2.0 resurgence.

I live in Oakland, CA with my husband, Brian; son, Jake (age 5); daughter Ruby (age 10); and stepdaughter Martha (age 12). I now work as a freelance user experience consultant. (Another inscrutable Internet title that has endured. It means I do research about consumers and business needs, then design web sites, applications, and services that meet the needs of real people.) I also write about issues related to working moms, all moms, really, on a variety of other blogs including The Huffington Post, Mamapedia, and Momsrising.

A little note on when I post to this blog: Lately I’ve been posting about once a month. If you love the blog but keep forgetting to check it, you might want to subscribe by email.

A little note about truth: My friends are very generous people; they’ve let me write about all kinds of intimate details of their lives, from bad bosses to pumping in cubicles to adventures with lice. To protect their identity, I often change their names and/or other identifying details of their story.

A little note on copyright: My posts to this blog are protected by U.S. copyright laws. I am happy to have you quote short passages from my work on your own websites and blogs and in print, provided you credit the work to me. Let’s keep the web free while also treating each other’s intellectual property with respect.