Irene Virag

Bio

Pulitzer Prize winner Irene Virag has been Newsday’s garden columnist for the past 10 years. She is a fellow of the Garden Writers Association and has won that organization’s writing award numerous times. During her Newsday career, she wrote a nature column, a home column and the Long Island Diary. She is a 10-time winner of the New York Newswomen’s Club Front Page Award for column and feature writing and her work is included in the American Society of Newspaper Editors “Best Newspaper Writing of 1998.”

Irene is a Master Gardener whose column merges the practical and the poetic. “I write about people as well as plants and see the garden as a metaphor for hope and renewal,” she says. The year she battled breast cancer, she transformed her front yard on the North Shore into an organic flower and vegetable garden that she calls “The Garden of Health and Joy.”

Irene was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal from the Foundation for Long Island State Parks for her work in helping to beautify the island. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University and a master’s from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and is the author of two books – “We’re All in This Together: Families Facing Breast Cancer” and “Gardening on Long Island with Irene Virag.”

She’s a popular speaker and teaches narrative journalism at Stony Brook University. You can visit her at www.irenevirag.com.