Petula Dvorak

Washington, D.C.

Local columnist

Education: University of Southern California

Petula Dvorak is a columnist for The Washington Post's local team who writes about homeless shelters, gun control, high heels, high school choirs, the politics of parenting, jails, abortion clinics, mayors, modern families, strip clubs and gas prices, among other things. Before coming to The Post, she covered social issues, crime and courts in New Orleans, New Jersey and Los Angeles. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California and the mother of two boys.
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Latest from Petula Dvorak

Use Giving Tuesday to help those imperiled by this election

Trump’s promises will target American communities and ideas. Here are the organizations that support them.

December 2, 2024
Hundreds gathered outside the Heritage Foundation headquarters in D.C. on Nov. 9 for the “Time to Resist” Women’s March. (Jordan Tovin for The Washington Post)

Pumpkins as political symbols?

When Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a federal holiday in 1863, abolitionists hailed pumpkins as a symbol of virtue and the opposite of mmoral Southern farming.

November 28, 2024
Baking pumpkins. (Petula Dvorak/The Washington Post)

Congress has always been weird about the bathrooms, and other places

Ever since the first woman was elected to Congress in 1917 and the first Black man in 1929, the nation’s leaders have struggled to let newcomers feel comfortable.

November 25, 2024
Rep. Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman elected to Congress in 1916, leaves the White House in 1917.

The fluoride fights are a decades-old cultural war America can’t quit

The fluoride wars go back to the 1940s, when opponents called it a conflict over civil rights, not public health.

November 22, 2024
A dentist treats a young patient in Greenbelt, Maryland, in 1942.

LGBTQ families rush to protect themselves from what Trump may bring

Lawyers hearing from a lot of LGBTQ families who worry the Trump administration will imperil their legal status and they want paperwork to protect themselves.

November 18, 2024
Same-sex marriage supporters hold up a giant flag in front of the Supreme Court on April 28, 2015. The justices that day heard oral arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges. (Allison Shelley/for The Washington Post)

Harriet Tubman becomes a one-star general in Maryland, 160 years late

A governor, generals and scores of veterans were on hand to see Harriet Tubman posthumously became a one-star, brigadier general in the Maryland Army National Guard on Monday.

November 11, 2024
Tina Wyatt, Harriet Tubman's great-great-great-grandniece, accepted Tubman's commission into the Maryland National Guard as a one-star general at a ceremony on Veterans Day at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park and Visitor Center.

She thought America would surprise her. Then Donald Trump won again.

Easter Brown, 83, believed she would witness history on election night. But it was the continued disappointment of being a Black woman in America.

November 7, 2024
Easter Brown, 83, put out snacks for an election night watch party she had hoped would be a historic victory for Vice President Kamala Harris.

This election isn’t about a woman. It’s about women.

The Women’s March showed a step away from celebratory pink and a campaign focusing on represenation and a leaned into the serious, women’s issues at stake.

November 4, 2024
Thousands of women and men marched on Washington on Nov. 2, in support of Kamala Harris and the rights of women.

In a nation divided, local news is what unites communities

A newspaper in Palm Springs eliminated opinion pieces on national politics for a month to see if divisions in the community lessened. They did, a lesson for us.

October 31, 2024

More than 100 years late, lynchings get a hearing

A Maryland commission on reconcilliation is holding hearings to examine historic lynchincs and unite the descendants of victims and perpetrators. Is it working?

October 28, 2024
Hearing mediator Roxanne Red-Wallace, right, hugs Tremain Smith, after Smith's testimony as a descendant of Harford County enslavers.