Olivia Taylor Barker, 1974-2014
USA TODAY's Olivia Barker tried her hand at puppeteering on 'Sesame Street' in 2004. (Photo: Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY)
Welcome. This is the gateway to the Olivia Barker Scholarship Fund, established to honor Olivia's passion for storytelling, her award-winning reporting, and to help sustain the legacy of her career.
Olivia was hired at USA Today in 2000 to cover American culture and entertainment. Over the next fourteen years, Olivia brought to life hundreds of stories in diamond-bright prose. To read Olivia's feature on "Sesame Street" was to slip your hand inside Elmo; her coverage of the Winter Olympics left her readers under a dusting of snow; her writing on the aftermath of Katrina and Hurricane Sandy made equally palpable the debris, the sorrow, and the triumph of spirit.
The Olivia Barker Scholarship Fund will award a scholarship every year to an aspiring journalist at the Columbia School of Journalism, where Olivia earned her master's degree and where she met her husband, Ben Court. This fund will cultivate young storytellers with a prodigious talent for capturing and celebrating American life as we live it. All gifts are fully tax-deductible.