“With her keen and curious mind, Carrie Hagen comes to her projects with a jump start. She has a reporter’s eye for detail, a writer’s love of facts, an editor’s understanding of what makes a good story.”
Steve Luxenberg, Washington Post associate
editor and award-winning author
A longtime contributor to Smithsonianmag.com, Carrie Hagen has also served as a narrative nonfiction writer for Recollection, A Civil Rights Legal Archive, a production of the Thurgood Marshall Institute and NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Kirkus Reviews called we is got him, her first book of narrative nonfiction, "a slice of American crime history both instructive and tragically entertaining." Hagen's latest project (forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press on December 1, 2026) is The Vigilance Network, The Secret Society That Moved Freedom Seekers Through Philadelphia. She teaches writing at Chestnut Hill College.