Kevin Fagan and Brant Ward
7 p.m. Thursday, April 12
Kevin Fagan is a long-time reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. He specializes in enterprise news-feature writing and breaking news, taking particular pleasure in ferreting out stories others might not find — from profiling the desperate lives of homeless drug addicts to riding the rails with hobos, finding people who sleep in coffins and detailing the intricacies of hunting down serial killers.
From 2003 to 2006, Kevin was the only beat reporter in the United States covering homelessness full time. He has witnessed seven prison executions and has covered many of the biggest breaking stories of our time, from the Sept. 11 terror attacks and the Columbine High School massacre to the 2008 presidential election, the Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnapping case and the Occupy movement.
Fagan has won more than 80 national and regional awards, including the national
James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism as well as a Knight Fellowship
to Stanford University.
Brant Ward
Brant Ward was a photographer for the San Francisco Chronicle for over thirty years. He retired in 2015 and continues to document our times.
In 2003, Ward and writer Kevin Fagan were assigned to cover the homeless predicament in San Francisco on the eve of a major mayoral election. The series, Shame of the City, included scenes from a traffic island, a family living out of their van, and a look inside a city shelter and the various SRO hotels that cover the Tenderloin area.
For the next decade, Ward and Fagan continued to tell the saga of the nation’s homeless population from New York to California.