Author’s Corner Q&A With Amy Sohn
by Ava Stryker-Robbins
Welcome to Author’s Corner, a new series by UrbanSense where we sit down with writers who are shaping conversation around cities, innovation, and the cultural currents of our time. From urban planners turned novelists to tech visionaries and culture entrepreneurs exploring the future of human connection, we'll learn from authors whose work captures the pulse of how we live, work, and plan the modern world. These are the voices helping us understand where we've been and where we're heading. Join us as we explore the stories behind the stories.
UrbanSense welcomes a diversity of viewpoints. Author’s views are their own and do not necessarily reflect any UrbanSense position.
About the author
Amy Sohn is a New York Times bestselling author of 13 books that have been published in eleven languages across five continents. She is also a journalist who was a columnist for the New York Post and New York magazine and who has contributed to several other publications including the New York Times and Streetsblog, where she was the first-ever Albany reporter and covered the 2025 session.
UrbanSense sat down with Amy to learn more about her career, cultural impact and motivations for writing at the intersection of transportation, politics, policy and culture in New York.
Q: You've had a front row seat at two New York halls of power: City Hall and the State Capitol. What were these experiences like and what surprised you the most about them?
Working at City Hall was very exciting. I got to play a significant role in press conferences involving the mayor and other senior leaders, including the Chief Climate Officer of New York City. I helped plan how a press conference was going to go, thought about the best backdrops, and worked with reporters.
It was especially exciting to hear talking points I had written spoken aloud during televised press conferences. One memorable moment was hearing my points about the importance of people being able to afford air conditioning—an issue of environmental justice directly tied to climate change—used by city leaders. That was very satisfying.
At the state legislature, I got a real crash course on how Albany works, how bills get drafted and passed. And on the journalism side, I got to experience a very different kind of ecosystem between policymakers and the press.
At City Hall, all the press had to carefully coordinate with multiple people and in Albany—where I worked as the first Albany reporter for Streetsblog—I was able to have spontaneous interactions with assembly members and senators, often by bumping into them in the hallways. So it was really fun to go from an environment in which press secretaries had all the power to an environment in which journalists have quite a lot of power.
Q: What is the inspiration for your writing? And how do you decide what pieces to write, what topics to write about?
The great joy of being a journalist is that you get to unpack things and explain things for a general audience. You get to make structures that can be impermeable to people, such as the state legislature, truly understandable.
I'm a research nerd and that was always true of me before I became a press secretary. My most recent book, The Man Who Hated Women, was a historically complex book about birth control activists in the 19th century.
When I came into communications work, I always worked very closely with policy people to make sure my facts were accurate and to make sure that I could understand the things that I was communicating to journalists. I felt like if I couldn't understand something, I couldn't do a good job of conveying it to people that were coming in with even less knowledge than I had.
So my inspiration is that I just love to research and I love to be accurate. I love to learn new things and I think you're never too old to learn new things.
I took a lot of pleasure as a press secretary and in working closely with policy people to sometimes do extra digging beyond what they knew about in order to get the exact question that a journalist was asking answered.
Q: You are also a well-known author of many books chronicling life in New York. How does your background in novel writing influence your journalistic work about key policy areas?
I have a strong understanding of character, so when I'm working on a team, I'm very conscious of the way people's emotional challenges affect the way they are at work. I'm really good at working on long-term projects because most of my novels have taken anywhere from 20 months to several years to complete. I'm very patient, I'm thorough, and I also understand the importance of teamwork because when you finish a novel you're collaborating with the sales team and a marketing team to get people to read your book t, even if the germ of the whole project was from your own brain.
Q: What do you enjoy most about being a novelist and how is that different from being a journalist?
Well, I enjoy the independence of being a novelist. You have an extraordinary amount of creative independence. What I enjoy about being a journalist is the short turnover time. You get to see the product of your work very quickly, and, because of the way it's disseminated to your readers, you get an immediate reaction in the form of comments and social media posts. You can even see exactly how many people read something.
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Q: What were key policies that you witnessed in your time in City Hall, the state legislature, and how do they make their way over the finish line or not?
City of Yes For Carbon Neutrality was something we worked on at the mayor's office that's going to ease pathways for solar and energy storage systems, which are two really important tools in adopting groundbreaking change. Battery Coastal Resilience - which has nothing to do with battery storage - is a major resilience project in Lower Manhattan that’s going to affect many people who live, work, or visit Lower Manhattan.
In the New York State legislature, I was a reporter, so I wasn't making policy, I was covering policy. But probably the biggest victory that I covered as a journalist for the livable streets movement at Streetsblog was the Stop Super Speeders bill (S4045B). It passed the State Senate and that's a bill that would require people who get more than 16 speeding tickets in a year to have a speed governor put in their car. It's modeled off of legislation around intoxicated driving and is a very common sense measure that allows people to keep their cars, use their cars to go to work, but to just not speed and kill other people in the course of doing what they need to do.
Q: What do you think more people should understand about specific environmental challenges?
I think that they need to know that climate change is closely correlated with and closely intertwined with other issues, and so that people who, for example, have challenges paying for their utilities are going to be more vulnerable in our climate reality. People who are older are going to have a harder time getting out of a building in a hurricane and so are people who live in subgrade housing or who live in impermeable areas that are impermeable because of historic housing and land use patterns. Certain groups of people were housed near the water that makes them more vulnerable and of course outdoor delivery workers are much more vulnerable than people who work inside.
Q: What are the policy areas you most enjoy covering and writing about?
Well, the most recent book that I told you about is about birth control policy in the 19th century and, in a weird way, I think it’s what got me excited about policy communications. Even though I wrote it before I had a policy graduate degree, I'm interested in reproductive health policy, and I'm interested in livable streets policy, which includes not only good and safe public transit but dense housing, and walkable cities. That means cities where people can have spontaneous interactions based on being able to get around in other ways than cars, which are very isolating and make people very lonely.
I have become more interested in livable streets since I had a child. The first time that I went to Albany to lobby for safe streets was almost exactly 10 years before I went to Albany to cover livable streets through Streetsblog. I did that as a mother with my daughter's school because a boy who had gone to my daughter's school had been tragically killed by a speeder.
Q: What is the relationship between journalism and policy? And how can journalism be used to create change?
Streetsblog, for example, is a nonprofit news outlet that has a strong perspective on the importance of livable streets in the functioning of democracies and in cities like New York.
The reporting that Streetsblog has done has actually affected policy. Streetsblog reported on a company called Fly e-bikes that was deceiving customers about the safety of its bikes and the city stopped using them in a swapping program.
That's an incredible example of investigative reporting changing policy. And of course, due to the advocacy of Families for Safe Streets, which is an organization that Streetsblog covers and gives a lot of attention to, New York City is now able to set its own speed limits on many of our streets. We took a historical problem with state / city collaboration and gave the city more power.
Q: How can the city and the state best work together with the new NYC mayoral administration? What advice might you have for the next mayor related to street safety or other key policy areas you are considering?
The state and city have collaborated effectively before and this time they have a common enemy: the Trump Administration. The state is only beginning to understand the impact of the President’s recent omnibus bill —which will require changes to our budget—but depending where we are in January, with a potential new mayor, the state and city can work together on issues important to New Yorkers.
I'm hopeful that whoever the mayor is on January 1, 2026, that person will look closely at bus lanes, intersections, bike lanes, bike speeds, road violence in New York City, and delivery worker safety and make a commitment to livable streets.
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