My name is Kat Dickey, and I’m a writer, editor, and researcher, based in Newark, NJ.
Living in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania through my college years and beyond, I worked as a journalist with foci in local housing affordability, inaccessible food networks, and digital information. A graduate of Muhlenberg College, I was the founding assistant editor of the Allentown Voice and the editor-in-chief of The Muhlenberg Weekly, amongst other accolades. I also worked as a digital content producer at Lehigh Valley Public Media after graduation, focusing on immersive presentations of data-rich projects.
My work has focused on advocating for economic justice and improving the accessibility of information, in the hopes of building a more informed and just democracy. Everything I take on is driven by the belief that each story can be brought closer to story consumers and allow them to care for that story and the people and issues within it more deeply as a result.
Check out this interactive presentation of a series of articles produced by me during my tenure at Lehigh Valley Public Media. These articles explore local contributions to NASA missions.
Board Game Academics, Volume II published my paper in March 2025, co-written with my close friend and collaborator, Josh Coslar. It focuses on the racialized representations of monks in the popular table-top roleplaying game, Dungeons and Dragons.
Since 2024, I’ve been involved as a member of the board of T.H.E. Hope NJ, a nonprofit focused on promoting radical inclusivity via good food and supplemental education to the youth and families of Teaneck, Hackensack, and Englewood, NJ. These three municipalities contain approximately 70% of the Black population of Bergen County, a suburban northern New Jersey county made of 73 separate municipalities.
In my story “Elevated lead levels have been found in six Lehigh Valley schools’ water. What are they doing about it?” I examined the Pennsylvania Dept. of Ed’s reporting of local lead level infractions in school water sources. This was in the wake of a national advocacy group giving PA’s lead-in-schools legislation a failing grade.
After 10 years attending/working at a Girl Scout camp in New Jersey, I profiled two Girl Scout camps in Eastern Pennsylvania. Pay special attention to captions on photos in the galleries.
This interactive, data-rich project was a collaboration between multiple reporters at Lehigh Valley Public Media, based on a 2023 Lehigh Valley Quality of Life report. I managed data visualizations, historical image sourcing, and actually constructing the project in Shorthand.
One of my first interactive stories, “The Dignity of Fresh Food,” explored local Lehigh Valley farms’ contributions to making fresh food accessible to low-income populations, especially those under food apartheid.
In “The Allentown housing crisis: the fight for affordable housing,” I interviewed multiple candidates in the 2021 Allentown mayoral race and compared their answers to those of subject experts in the field of affordable housing as part of an investigation into housing inequity in Allentown. This project won several awards at Muhlenberg College and jump-started the Allentown Voice community reporting project.
For an exercise in an early journalism class of mine, I interviewed a local entrepreneur for the fourth anniversary of her farm-to-table restaurant opening. “A Switchback Chat” is a hand-transcribed, minimally edited version of that conversation.