About me

Ken Edelstein — hey, that’s me! — is an award-winning newspaper journalist who’s sweating the transition to online … but enjoying it nonetheless.

I’m a native of Dalton, Ga. My family moved to Caracas, Venezuela, and Toronto, Ontario, before we headed back to Dalton and then to Atlanta (My dad was a textile engineer and Dalton is the “Carpet Capital of the World”).

I was a social studies nerd. But it was on canoeing and backpacking trips around the Southeast, starting while I was in high school, that I came to value the environment and to view our culture’s conflict with nature as the central dilemma of our age.

Pretty heavy, huh?

After college in Connecticut, a couple of years working for a trade publication in D.C,. and about a year of traveling and freelance writing, I settled back in Georgia. At the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, I covered business, crime, Fort Benning, city politics, state politics and the environment. I also served as a city desk editor. Then, I moved  to Creative Loafing, Atlanta’ alternative newsweekly, where I spent three years as managing editor and then eight as editor.

As a reporter at the Ledger-Enquirer, I won seven journalism awards. While I was editor of Creative Loafing, we accumulated around 40 national and regional journalism honors.

My freelance work has been published in the New York Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta Magazine, Governing, the New York Times Magazine, Plenty, yada-yada-yada.

At CL, I also helped to develop several popular blogs, including Fresh Loaf, which is probably the leading general news blog in Atlanta. Now, I blog about local Atlanta issues and other interests at AtlantaUnsheltered.com.

Cult Of Green is a national blog on a more defined beat: The intersection of the environment, the media and popular culture. I cover similar ground with the weekly “Media Mayhem” column for the Mother Nature Network.

My wife, Silvia Medrano-Edelstein, and I live in Midtown Atlanta, with Peanut the dog and Coconut the cat.

You can get in touch with me by emailing me at ken@atlantaunsheltered.com.