Susan Berfield writes and edits investigative and feature stories for Bloomberg Businessweek. She's examined the dangers of generic drugs and the flaws in our recall system. She's revealed a company's years-long effort to misinform residents and discredit activists seeking to remove nuclear waste from a Superfund site outside St. Louis. Several months later, the Environmental Protection Agency reversed an earlier decision and demanded the company do so. Using confidential documents, she exposed how Walmart spies on its workers to prevent them from organizing. And she helped uncover a con man who talked a small Missouri town out of millions and was later convicted of fraud.

 

Stories she's edited were finalists for a National Magazine award and Overseas Press Club award. A collaboration with WNYC about the secretive family behind the largest mall in the country was a Gerald Loeb finalist. She's also won awards from the Newswomen's Club of New York, the New York Press Club, the Deadline Club, the American Society of Business Publication Editors, and the Education Writers' Association. Her story about honey smugglers was the basis for an episode of the documentary series Rotten, which premiered on Netflix in 2018. She’s appeared on National Public Radio and PBS NewsHour.

 

Before joining Businessweek, she was a senior writer at Asiaweek in Hong Kong, where her story, "Ten Days that Shook Indonesia," won the Society of Asian Publishers’ Reporting Award and the Hong Kong Human Rights Press Award.

 

She earned a master’s degree at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where she was a Zuckerman Fellow. Her undergraduate degree is from Brown University; after graduating, she co-directed a documentary in India funded by Brown's Arnold Fellowship.

 

The Hour of Fate, her first book, was supported by the Logan Nonfiction Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.