Molly O'Toole is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist working on "The Route," a nonfiction book on global migration through the Americas to the United States, for Crown Publishing, a Penguin Random House imprint. She is also developing an accompanying podcast.

O’Toole is currently a fellow at the Wilson Center, New America, and the Watchdog Writers Group. She recently was an immigration and security reporter for The Los Angeles Times, and a fellow at MacDowell, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and the Logan Nonfiction Program. She has also taught and lectured at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, George Washington University, Georgetown University, and the Poynter Institute, among others. She previously was a senior reporter at Foreign Policy and The Atlantic’s Defense One.

From Latin America to South Asia, O’Toole has written and worked for outlets such as The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Newsweek, The Intercept, the Associated Press, Reuters, and more. She was awarded the first-ever Pulitzer Prize in audio reporting in 2020 with This American Life and Emily Green, and served as a juror for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. Her work has also been recognized by the Livingston Awards, the National Press Club, the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, and the Silvers Grants for Work in Progress, among others. She is a graduate of Cornell and New York University, and is based in Washington, D.C., but she will always be Californian.