Megan Kimble 

Megan is an Austin-based journalist, author, and editor. Formerly the executive editor at the Texas Observer, a statewide nonprofit news outlet, she wrote about housing, transportation, and urban development for The New York Times, Texas Monthly, The Guardian, and Bloomberg’s CityLab. For the Texas Observer, she covered violations of the Fair Housing Act across Texas, uncovered evictions filed illegally during the pandemic, and investigated the tenant screening industry. Her writing has also been published in The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

Her second book, City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways (Crown 2024) covers the troubling history of America’s urban highways and the battle over their future in Austin, Dallas, and Houston, following residents who risk losing their homes and businesses to planned expansions and examining successful highway removals in cities like Rochester, New York, to argue that we must dismantle these city-splitting roadways to ensure a more just, sustainable future. In 2023, City Limits was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.

She is also the author of Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food (William Morrow 2015), a memoir of her year-long journey of eating only whole, unprocessed foods, intertwined with a journalistic exploration of what “unprocessed” really means, why it matters, and how to afford it. Unprocessed was named a Southwest Book of the Year in 2015.

As a 2024 Mesa Refuge Writer-at-the-Edge, Megan wrote:

“For me, writing on the edge means exploring ideas that exist outside the mainstream. In City Limits, I explored the idea of removing urban highways. It turns out that the best place to write about highways is nowhere near them, and that’s what Mesa Refuge offered me: a literal edge. I wrote almost a fourth of City Limits looking out over the Tomales Bay from the West cabin at the Mesa Refuge, and I am so grateful for that time and space.”