Francine Kiefer is a journalist based in the Los Angeles area. In 2025, she retired from The Christian Science Monitor, where she was West Coast Bureau Chief. Her coverage won five first-prize awards from the Los Angeles Press Club.
She also has a long journalistic history in Washington as the Monitor’s Congressional Correspondent and earlier as White House correspondent – covering the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In between those two assignments, she served as commentary editor and editorial writer, also in Washington. In 1989, Francine reported on the fall of the Berlin Wall as the Monitor’s correspondent in Germany. In her early career, she was a business reporter.
Francine also worked for nearly five years as the National Editor for The San Jose Mercury News in California’s Silicon Valley. She holds a BA in English literature from Smith College and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Goucher College. She has taught workshops on opinion writing at George Washington University and other colleges.