Mimi Swartz, the author, with Sherron Watkins, of Power Failure, The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, is an executive editor of Texas Monthly. Previously, she was a staff writer at Talk, from April 1999 to April 2001, and a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1997 to 2001. Prior to joining the New Yorker, she worked at Texas Monthly for thirteen years. In 1996 Swartz was a finalist for two National Magazine Awards and won in the public interest category for “Not What the Doctor Ordered.” She was also a National Magazine Award finalist for her November 2005 issue story on tort reform, titled “Hurt? Injured? Need a Lawyer? Too Bad!” and won the 2006 John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest, Magazine Journalism, for the same story. In 2013 she won her second National Magazine Award (again in the category of public interest), for “Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives,” a compelling look at the state of women's health care in Texas.
Over the years, Swartz’s work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Slate, National Geographic, and the New York Times’ op-ed page and Sunday magazine. It has also been collected in Best American Political Writing 2006 and Best American Sportswriting 2007. She has been a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 1994. Swartz grew up in San Antonio and graduated from Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She now lives in Houston with her husband, John Wilburn, and son, Sam.
In this exclusive excerpt from 'Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart,' world-renowned Houston surgeon Bud Frazier races to help an ailing patient by implanting a revolutionary device that may one day save millions of lives.
Outside a cookie shop in one of Houston’s most idyllic neighborhoods, a West University Place council member spied Trump’s name on a teenager’s shirt and yelled a few of the president’s worst words at her. Then the internet found out. It's springtime in the age of hysteria.
As I have aged and faced my own challenges as a female on this planet, I have come to a different understanding of Barbara Bush.
Why the remarkable heroism displayed by my fellow Houstonians will be required for years to come.
Dear Governor Abbott, I just happened to catch your remarks from yesterday afternoon, the ones you made while visiting the Austin gun range to sign the bill that lowers the cost of gun licenses in Texas. The Dallas Morning News story I read said that you celebrated by firing a 9…
A heart surgeon leads his city to the forefront of medical innovation.
Public school parents with special-ed kids often find themselves squaring off against school districts and the taxpayer-funded lawyers who protect them.
Anna Nicole Smith rose from a small town girl in Mexia to an icon, but her demons followed her far beyond Texas.
Executive editor Mimi Swartz says goodbye to Tom Curtis, a writer, reporter, and former Texas Monthly contributor, who died earlier this week.
