Panel: Getting the Scoop: The Highs and Lows of Undercover Reporting

What do journalists discover when they “go undercover”? How do they get the scoop and is it as exciting as it sounds? February’s Grotto Night highlights three journalists whose undercover and immersive journalism spans death, mental health, and homelessness. Join us for a lively discussion with former San Francisco Chronicle journalists Kevin Fagan, Katherine Seligman, and Katy Butler. Moderated by Nate Olivarez-Giles and curated by Janine Kovac.

Katy Butler’s New York Times bestseller, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death, blends immersive family memoir with hard-hitting investigative reporting. Exploring how advanced medical technologies foreclosed her father’s hope for a “good death,” it was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year.” Her writing has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Science Writing, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine. She is currently writing about shame and sexual violence.

Kevin Fagan is a longtime journalist, spending three decades at the San Francisco Chronicle before leaving in 2025 to pursue book writing. Nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize, his awards include the national James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism and the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University. Specializing in homelessness, he also covered the 9/11 terror attacks, executions, serial killers and California’s wildfires. In 2025 Simon & Schuster published his book The Lost and The Found: A True Story of Homelessness, Found Family and Second Chances.

Nate Olivarez-Giles (he/him) is a fiction writer and exploring themes of love, grief, class, race, masculinity, sexuality, technology, climate change, and chicano life in the future. Over the last two decades, Nate has worked in journalism and technology, at the Arizona Daily Star, Los Angeles Times, Wired, The Verge, The Wall Street Journal, TWiT, and Apple Inc. Nate was a James Reston Fellow at The New York Times in 2008 and a 3rd Space by Roots Wounds Words Fiction Fellow in 2024.

Katherine Seligman is an award-winning journalist and author in San Francisco. She has been a reporter at USA Today, the San Francisco Examiner and a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Magazine. Her work has been featured on NPR, and in Life, Redbook, The Sun Magazine, the anthology “Fresh Takes,” Best American Essays, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, At the Edge of the Haight, won the PEN/Bellwether Prize.

The Writers Grotto is a community of working writers and narrative artists who connect in physical and virtual space, pooling their talents to support each other, mentor and teach others, and engage the wider world. The Grotto fosters a literary culture that is generous in spirit and deeply inclusive, elevating writers of all backgrounds. 

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This program is part of Grotto Nights at the Library.