Mitra Kalita

S. Mitra Kalita is the managing editor for editorial strategy at the Los Angeles Times. She previously served as the executive editor (at large) for Quartz and the site’s founding ideas editor. She also oversaw the launches of Quartz India and Quartz Africa. She worked previously at the Wall Street Journal, where she directed coverage of the Great Recession, launched a local news section for New York City and reported on the housing crisis as a senior writer. She was a founding editor of Mint, a business paper in New Delhi, and has previously worked for the Washington Post, Newsday and the Associated Press. She is the author of three books related to migration and globalization, including the highly acclaimed “Suburban Sahibs,” and speaks seven languages (but only four of them half decently). She has taught journalism at St. John’s, UMass-Amherst, and Columbia Jschool, and previously served as president of the South Asian Journalists Association. She is at work on a book about schools and segregation, begun as a Spencer Fellow at Columbia University. Born in Brooklyn, Mitra was raised in Long Island, Puerto Rico and New Jersey—with regular trips to her grandparents’ villages in Assam, India.