Angela Bonavoglia

Angela Bonavoglia is an award-winning journalist and author who covers social, health, religious and women’s issues. Her feature articles, investigative reports, op-eds, personal essays, and profiles have appeared in Ms. (longtime contributing editor), the Chicago Tribune, The Nation, Salon.com, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Newsday, The New York Times, the National Catholic Reporter, and the HuffingtonPost.com (where she blogs), among other publications.

Her article, "The Church’s Tug of War," about women as an invisible force for reform in the Roman Catholic Church, was the lead article in The Nation in the wake of the clergy sex abuse scandals of 2002. It provided a fresh analysis of the role of women in the progressive Church reform movement at an unprecedented moment in American Church history. It also served as the basis for her most recent book, Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church. Since its publication, Bonavoglia has spoken around the country about women and Catholic Church reform and been a guest on nearly 60 television and radio shows.

Bonavoglia also authored The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion, an oral history spanning seven decades, from the 1920s through the 1980s. With a foreword by Gloria Steinem, it features Bonavoglia’s interviews with celebrities, authors, activists, clerics and medical providers about their experiences with abortion, including the special struggles faced by Catholic women (Random House, 1991; Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002).

The Choices We Made was featured on "Oprah" and NPR’s "Lenny Lopate Show." Excerpts appeared in Cosmopolitan, Ms., and Hippocrates (now Health), and the book was discussed in The New York Times (Anna Quindlen's column), Newsday, the New York Daily News, the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, Mirabella, and Mother Jones.

In 1998, Bonavoglia received an Exceptional Merit Media Award (sponsored by Radcliffe College and the National Women's Political Caucus) for magazine health reporting. Her articles have been reprinted in book collections--most recently, her Nation article on Catholic women reformers in Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror (Thunder's Mouth Press/​Nation Books).

Bonavoglia also has worked as a social worker, held key administrative and consultative positions, and written for leading foundations, public agencies and nonprofit organizations, including the Ford Foundation, the Ms. Foundation for Women, Women and Philanthropy, the New York Community Trust, the Coalition of 100 Black Women, Beth Israel Medical Center, and the New York City Health Department. She holds an MSW from New York University.