Faculty
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Robert S. Boynton
Associate Professor Lit Rep, Director
Robert S. Boynton is the director of NYU's Literary Reportage concentration. He was graduated with honors in philosophy and religion from Haverford College, and received an MA in political science from Yale University. His book, The New New Journalism was published by Vintage Books in 2005, and he has written about culture and ideas for The New Yorker (where he has been a contributing editor) and Harper's (where he has been a senior editor). His byline has also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Lingua Franca, Bookforum, Columbia Journalism Review, The New Republic, The Nation, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and many other publications. For a selection of his work, go to robertboynton.com. Information about The New New Journalism can be found at newnewjournalism.com.
Watch Boynton's video on Literary Reportage.
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Ted Conover
Distinguished Writer in Residence
Ted Conover is the author of five books, most recently The Routes of Man, about roads, and Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, an account of his ten months spent working as a corrections officer at New York's Sing Sing Prison. Newjack won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 and was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His other books are Whiteout: Lost in Aspen, Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders With America's Illegal Migrants, ( and Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails With America's Hoboes. A summa cum laude graduate of Amherst College, Conover spent two years at Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar. In 2001, he received an honorary doctorate from Amherst and in 2003, a Guggenheim Fellowship. In recent years he has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the University of Oregon. He contributes to publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others.
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Pete Hamill
Distinguished Writer in Residence
Pete Hamill is a veteran New York journalist and novelist. He's the author of numerous books, including Downtown: My Manhattan, Diego Rivera and A Drinking Life. His nine novels include Snow in August and Forever, both of which were New York Times bestsellers.
Hamill was born in Brooklyn, the eldest son of Irish immigrant parents. After service in the U.S. Navy, he attended Mexico City College in 1956-57, as a student on the G.I. Bill. He began his journalistic career in 1960 at the New York Post. He has covered wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Northern Ireland, as well as the domestic disturbances in American cities in the 1960s. His work appeared in the Post, Daily News, and Village Voice. In addition to his many years as a columnist, he has served as editor-in-chief of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News.
At the same time, he wrote for many magazines: the Saturday Evening Post, New York (where he was a contributing writer for 25 years), Esquire and others. He has two daughters and one grandson. He and his wife, writer Fukiko Aoki, divide their time between New York City and Cuernavaca, Mexico.
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Perri Klass
Professor Carter Journalism Institute, Director
Perri Klass, M.D. has been writing as a medical journalist dating back to her years as a student at Harvard Medical School in the 1980s, when she published a series of essays, reflections on medical training, in the Hers column of The New York Times. Since that time she has published her medical journalism in many newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times Science Section, The New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, The New England Journal of Medicine, Esquire, Parenting, and Vogue. She has written regular columns about medicine for Discover Magazine, American Health, Massachusetts Medicine, and Diversion. Her essays about medicine and medical training have been collected in the books A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student (1987), and Baby Doctor: A Pediatrician’s Training (1992). At NYU, Dr. Klass will be a professor both in Journalism and in Pediatrics.
Klass is particularly interested in issues of medicine and ethics, issues of infectious disease and issues of pediatrics and literacy. She also writes regularly about travel, food, parenting, and knitting. She is the recipient of a James Beard Journalism Award for magazine writing on diet, nutrition, and health, a Virtual Mentor Award from the American Medical Association, awarded for her writing, and an Honors Award from the New England Chapter of the American Medical Writers Association, along with five O. Henry Awards for her short fiction. She has frequently lectured on medicine and writing, including commencement addresses at many medical schools. Her role as a medical journalist was recently featured in the National Library of Medicine exhibit on Changing the Face of Medicine: Celebrating America’s Women Physicians at the National Institutes of Health. She received her A.B. from Harvard in 1979, her M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1986, completed her residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital, Boston, in 1989, her fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases at Boston City Hospital in 1992, and practiced pediatrics at an urban health care clinic in Boston for 12 years. As the Medical Director of Reach Out and Read, a national literacy program, she has trained physicians around the country on how to integrate books and advice about reading aloud into pediatrics. She has taught science writing at Harvard University, and has served as Chair of the Executive Board of PEN New England.
Klass is the author of three novels, The Mystery of Breathing (2004), Other Women’s Children (1990), and Recombinations (1985), and two collections of short stories, Love and Modern Medicine (2001), and I Am Having an Adventure (1986). Her other books include Quirky Kids: Understanding and Helping Your Child Who Doesn’t Fit In (coauthored with Eileen Costello, MD, 2003) and Every Mother Is A Daughter (coauthored with Sheila Solomon Klass, 2006).
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Brooke Kroeger
Professor GloJo, Director
Brooke Kroeger directs Global and Joint Program Studies and is the faculty liaison for The Local East Village, the collaborative community news and information site of NYU Journalism and the New York Times. She was department chair from 2005-2011 and the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute’s inaugural director from 2008-2011.
She is the author of the forthcoming Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception and its companion database. Her three previous books are Passing: When People Can't Be Who They Are (Fall 2003), Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst (1999) and Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (1994).
As a journalist, she worked for Newsday, serving as UN Correspondent and as a deputy metropolitan editor for New York Newsday. This followed an eight-year stint overseas in the Scripps Howard days of United Press International with postings in Chicago, Brussels, London and Tel Aviv. She was Tel Aviv bureau chief for three years before returning to London to serve as the agency's chief editor for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. She started with the wire service in its Chicago bureau, and over the course of four years, wrote about everything from local and state politics to sports. Her freelanced work has appeared in various magazines as well as in the New York Times, Newsday, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. She was the principal consultant for the PBS documentary on Nellie Bly for “The American Experience: Around the World in 72 Days." Reviews of her books and a selection of her work can be viewed on her website.
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James McBride
Distinguished Writer in Residence
James McBride is a writer and composer. His memoir, The Color of Water (Riverhead/Putnam), is an American literary classic. It rested on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years, and is read in colleges across America. His latest book is Miracle At St. Anna (Riverhead 2003), a novel. He is a former staff writer for The Wilmington (Del.) News Journal, The Boston Globe, People Magazine, and The Washington Post (Style Section). His work has appeared in The New York Times and Rolling Stone. He holds several awards for his work as a composer, including The American Music Theater Festival's Stephen Sondheim Award. He has written songs for Anita Baker and Grover Washington, Jr., among others. He attended Oberlin College (1979 BM Communications), Columbia University (MSJ, Journalism,1980), and Sidewalk University (everybody graduates). He holds several honorary doctorates and has lectured at various venues across America.
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Suketu Mehta
Associate Professor Lit Rep
Suketu Mehta is a journalist and fiction writer. His nonfiction book "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found" won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the Whiting Writers Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta’s work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harpers Magazine, Time, and Condé Nast Traveler. Mehta is currently working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship.
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Michael Norman
Associate Professor Lit Rep
Michael Norman, is the co-author of TEARS IN THE DARKNESS: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath (2009), a work of narrative non-fiction that was on the New York Times bestseller list for eight weeks and was picked by Times critic Dwight Garner, as well as other reviewers, as one of the top ten books of year. He has also written THESE GOOD MEN: Friendships Forged in War, a memoir published to critical acclaim in 1990. He is a former reporter and columnist for The New York Times national, foreign and metropolitan desks and was the inaugural writer for the following New York Times columns: "A Sense of Place", a monthly column that explored the dislocations of modern life in one suburban town; "Lessons", a national column on education; and "Our Towns", a twice-weekly column on life outside New York City.
Norman's work also includes major articles for various other national publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine and GQ Magazine. His work has been syndicated both here and abroad. He is currently working on a second book with his wife, Elizabeth M. Norman, an exploration of Bellevue Hospital in New York, the oldest continuously operating public hospital in the country.
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Sarah Saffian
Adjunct Faculty
Sarah Saffian is an author, a journalist, and a teacher. Ithaka (hardcover: Basic Books, paperback: Dell), her memoir of being an adoptee who was found by her birth family, was widely and favorably reviewed—by The New York Times Book Review, USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, Slate, Salon, Francine Prose for Elle, others—was translated into Italian (Itaca, Corbaccio), and is over a decade in print. As a journalist, Saffian has worked as the Editorial Director of She Writes, a Senior Editor for Entertainment Weekly, a Senior Writer for Us magazine, and a Staff Writer for The New York Daily News, and has contributed to publications including The New York Times, The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, Harper’s Bazaar, Redbook, Slate, and Smithsonian. Formerly a journalism professor in the undergraduate writing department at The New School, Saffian has also taught at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and teaches memoir and narrative journalism each July at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. She graduated with Honors in English and American Literature from Brown and received an M.F.A. in Non-Fiction Writing from Columbia.
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David Samuels
Adjunct Faculty
David Samuels, contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and regular contributor to The New Yorker, was named one of 50 "Writers to Watch" by Editor and Publisher in 2000 and named one of the "Top 10 feature writers 35 and under in America" by the Columbia Journalism Review in 2002. BA American History, Harvard; MA American History, Princeton. His books Only Love Can Break Your Heart and The Runner will be coming out in March, 2008 from The New Press.
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Lawrence Weschler
Distinguished Writer in Residence
Lawrence Weschler, a graduate of Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been, since the early '80s, a staff writer for The New Yorker, where his work has shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992) and was recently granted a Lannan Literary Award. His books of political reportage include "The Passion of Poland" (1984); "A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers" (1990); "Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas" (1998), and the forthcoming "Vermeer in Bosnia." His "Passions and Wonders" series currently comprises "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin" (1982); "David Hockney's Cameraworks" (1984); "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders" (1995); "A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces" (1998); and "Boggs: A Comedy of Values" (1999). He has taught, variously, at Princeton, Columbia, UCSC, Bard, Vassar, and Sarah Lawrence, and is a contributing editor of McSweeney's and Threepenny Review.