Kerry Lester is the Daily Herald's politics and projects writer, covering national, state and local politics through a suburban lens.

First hired as a part-time editorial assistant in the paper's features department, Kerry covered education before moving to the political beat in July 2010.

In this role, she has broken a number of national stories, including the decision of Tea Party firebrand Joe Walsh to switch Congressional districts in his bid for re-election, and the potentially costly decision of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign not to challenge the petitions of Rick Santorum in Illinois. She has written about the trajectory of House GOP Chief Deputy Whip Peter Roskam and the recovery of U.S. Senator Mark Kirk from a stroke extensively.

Kerry has won a number local and national awards from the Chicago Journalists Association, Inland Press Association and Chicago Headline Club.

The story she is proudest of is a series about the physical and emotional recovery of an Elgin teacher who was stabbed by a student inside her classroom in January 2008. The second half to that series - a probing look into the impulse behind the attack - came after Kerry spent more than three years working to obtain an interview with the incarcerated teen. These stories uncovered problems across the suburbs with how schools and police communicate about troubled teens and inspired a bill that is making its way through the state legislature.

A native of Des Plaines, Kerry earned a bachelor's degree from Villanova University and a master's degree from the Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland.

She lives in Arlington Heights.