Susan Berfield

Susan Berfield (Fall 2018) is an award-winning feature writer and investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News. Her story about an iniquitous stem cell treatment center won a Newswomen’s Club of New York prize. A collaboration with WNYC about the questionable financing and secretive management behind the largest mall in the country was a Loeb finalist in 2017. Another of Susan’s stories, about the biggest food fraud in U.S. history, was the basis for an episode of the documentary series “Rotten,” which premiered on Netflix in 2018.

Using confidential documents, she exposed how Walmart spied on its workers. She also uncovered a con man who talked a small Missouri town out of millions; her reporting helped the district attorney convict him of fraud. Her stories have led to interviews on the “PBS News Hour,” “Weekend Edition,” “Marketplace,” “Money Talking,” “On Point,” “Here and Now,” “The Leonard Lopate Show,” “The Brian Lehrer Show” and “Monocle.”

As a Logan Nonfiction fellow, Susan will be at work on a book for Bloomsbury tentatively titled “The Hour of Fate” that will tell the story of the first president to challenge Wall Street. It will be a tightly focused narrative of the two-year period, from 1902 to 1904, when Theodore Roosevelt and John Pierpont Morgan battled for control over how business in America would operate. After Roosevelt held Morgan to account in the Supreme Court, he went on to create entire agencies to regulate business, protect consumers from dangerous foods and drugs, and protect workers on the job.