Maria Karagianis Profile

I am a writer, public speaker and social entrepreneur who moved last year to Colorado from Boston with my husband Tim O'Neill, a retired attorney. I am also a mother of two daughters and grand-mother – "Yiayia" as we say in Greek – to five.

I started my journalism career at the Boston Globe, where I was part of a team of 30 editors, reporters and photographers awarded the Pulitzer prize gold medal for coverage of Boston's school desegregation crisis.

I was assigned later by the Globe as a foreign correspondent during apartheid in South Africa, where I lived in Capetown and Johannesburg and traveled through most of southern Africa. I also worked as a reporter for the Rand Daily Mail, a prize-winning newspaper that was eventually closed down by the apartheid government. Returning to Boston, I covered Massachusetts state and national politics, was a magazine writer and in 2016, was invited back to the Globe for two years as a guest editor on the editorial page.

After earning a master's degree mid-career at Harvard, I became a social entrepreneur who – with the help of federal judges, educators and top law firms in Boston, founded Discovering Justice – an organization housed in the U.S. Courthouse on Boston Harbor, which has taught thousands of children and adults about justice, civics and our duties as citizens in a democracy.

Since 2007, as a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow, I have been invited by dozens of colleges and universities around the United States to serve week-long teaching, writing and speaking seminars as well as giving many public talks on subjects ranging from "Making a Meaningful Life" to the refugee crisis on the Greek island of Lesbos.

I believe in the necessity and value of strong local journalism for the preservation of our democracy. I am honored to be part of the great editorial team here in Niwot at the Left Hand Valley Courier.