Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969-70
• Where—Billings, Montana, USA
• Education—B.A., Northwestern University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Kim Barker is an American memoirist and journalist, best known for The Taliban Shuffle—later titled Whiskey Tango Foxtrot after the 2016 film adaptation by Tina Fey. The book recounts her time as Chicago Tribune war correspondent in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Barker was born in Montana, living in Billings until 13 when her family moved. She attended Northwestern University, earning her B.A. in journalism. Working the Chicago Tribune metro desk during the 9/11 attack, she decided to ask for an overseas assignment. Up to that point, she had made only a couple of overseas trips as a reporter, and the most danger she'd experienced had been misreading a map and finding herself at the head of a fast-moving forest fire—a background which didn't exactly prepare her for the rigors of working in the world's war zones.
Yet as she told the paper's foreign editor, "I am single and I have no children, therefore I'm expendable, and I'll go anywhere you want"...which is how she eventually became the paper's South Asian Bureau chief, interviewing Afghan warlords and evading suicide bombs. Despite the danger—or perhaps because of it—Barker admits to never having felt more alive then when she was close to death. As she told The Missoulian:
[T]here's something about being there, in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, where I felt like everything mattered. It just all seemed so important. All of our conversations revolved around world affairs, and this war, and what should be done in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Everything was just covered in this idea that this was vital, what's happening over here...and that you were writing history.
During the time of her coverage (2004-2009), Barker developed a deep affection for Afghanistan, which she points out is similar in many ways—with its mountains and rural lifestyle—to the beauty and hardiness of Montana. As much as she was drawn to the region and its people, however, she left once she realized that by continuing as a war correspondent, she risked becoming a "war hack." Barker now works for the New York Times.
Read Vanity Fair about what it feels like for Barker to have Tina Fey play her in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.