Phuong Ly is a freelance magazine writer, consultant and journalism teacher. A former award-winning reporter for The Washington Post, she has taught writing workshops for the Hearst Symposium, Poynter Institute and Freedom Forum Diversity Institute at Vanderbilt University. Her work has appeared in Business 2.0, The Washington Post Magazine, People, San Francisco, Baltimore and other publications. She is co-founder of a blog, www.minortroubles.com.

A portfolio of her stories is featured in the book Best Newspaper Writing 2006, published by the Poynter Institute. Her work has been honored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Freedom Forum, National Education Writers Association, Missouri School of Journalism's national lifestyle journalism awards program, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism's annual race and ethnicity workshop and Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association.

At The Washington Post, she wrote about a variety of topics including crime, education, religion and immigration. She studied religion in Nigeria as an International Reporting Project fellow at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. She has also been a reporter at The Charlotte Observer.

She grew up in Salisbury, N.C., and has a bachelor's degree in journalism and history from the University of North Carolina. She and her family escaped communist Vietnam in a fishing boat in 1978 and spent six months in a refugee camp in Malaysia.