[2] Kathleen Kingsbury grew up in Portland, Oregon, and did her undergraduate work at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
[4][6] On June 7, 2020, she was named "as acting Editorial Page Editor through the November election"[7] at The New York Times, replacing James Bennet.
[4][5][9] Kingsbury's "Service Not Included" series about labor conditions in Boston restaurants earned her the Walker Stone Award for Editorial Writing from the Scripps Howard Foundation in 2014, as well as the Burl Osborne Award for Editorial Leadership from the American Society of News Editors in 2015.
[10][11] In 2015, Kingsbury won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for a series of articles exposing the unfair working conditions facing restaurant workers, including the negative financial effects of the American tipping system, the prevalence of wage theft, and the real human cost of cheap menu items.
Kingsbury wrote one of the New York Times opinion articles that dismissed transgender youth and called their gender identity a phase.