Mentorship Program
Every Literary Reportage student is paired with a professional writer for one semester of mentorship. It is a wonderful opportunity for an up-and-coming journalist to work with a professional, helping him on every facet of a project. Every week, in exchange for five hours of research and reporting assistance, the writer will critique the student’s work.
The mentorship program is one of many ways that the Literary Reportage concentration makes the most of our position in one of the most writer-dense cities in the world. Here are some of the professional journalists who have taken part in the program so far.
Michelle Goldberg is an author and senior contributing writer for The Daily Beast/Newsweek. Her first book, The New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (WW Norton), delved into some of the reddest precincts of the United States to expose the ascendant politico-religious fundamentalism dominating the Republican Party and, at the time, the Bush administration. It was a finalist for the 2007 New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism.
Elizabeth Green is a reporter and editor at Gotham Schools and also writes for The New York Times Magazine and other publications. She is currently working on a book called How to Build a Better Teacher. She previously covered education for the New York Sun and for U.S. News & World Report magazine.
Matt Gross is a food and travel writer who works for publications such as Saveur, Afar, WorldHum.com, and The New York Times, where he wrote the Frugal Traveler column and now contributes to the series “Getting Lost.” He also writes “The Voyager,” a column for Currency, a personal-finance website run by American Express, and blogs at “The Minor Glories.”
Jack Hitt, contributing editor to The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and the radio program This American Life, is a master storyteller. He has written about a small California town that was (wrongfully) paranoid about toxic waste, boated through an Arkansas swamp in search of the mythical ivory-billed woodpecker, and learned about Multi-Zap Zappers among the Serbian New Age enthusiasts who sheltered war criminal Radovan Karadzic. Recently, he began doing performance pieces, including his solo show, “Making Up the Truth.”
Kathryn Joyce is a freelance journalist based in New York City and author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (Beacon Press, 2009). Her freelance writing has appeared in The Nation, Mother Jones, Salon, Ms., and other publications. She is former managing editor of The Revealer.org, a project of the New York University Center for Religion and Media, and the web editor of the Revenue Watch Institute.
Larissa MacFarquhar has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. Her subjects have included John Ashbery and Edward Albee, among many others. Before joining The New Yorker, MacFarquhar was a senior editor at Lingua Franca and an advisory editor at The Paris Review.
Jennifer Senior is a staff writer for New York Magazine and currently working on a book called All Joy and No Fun: The Parent’s Paradox, to be published by Ecco/HarperCollins.
Peter J. Boyer joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1992. He has written on a wide range of subjects, including politics, the military, religion, and sports. Before joining The New Yorker, Boyer was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and a television critic for National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” He won a George Foster Peabody Award, an Emmy, and consecutive Writers Guild Awards for his reporting for the documentary series “Frontline.” He is the author of the book “Who Killed CBS?: The Undoing of America’s Number One News Network ” (1988) and is at work on a book about American evangelism.
Alan Burdick writes for numerous publications including The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, GQ, and Natural History. He has also worked as an editor at The New York Times Magazine, Discover, and The Sciences, and was the editorial producer and senior writer for Science Bulletins, a multimedia science-news division of the American Museum of Natural History. Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, his first book, was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Awards and won the Overseas Press Club award for environmental reporting. Alan’s other accolades include entry in the 2003 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology; winner of the 1995 AAAS Westinghouse prize for magazine feature-writing, and co-recipient of the 1992 Olive Branch Award. He has been awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Benoit Denizet-Lewis is a contributing writer with The New York Times Magazine,where he covers stories about addiction, youth culture, sex and sexuality, sports, and music. He’s also the editor-in-chief of the Good Men Project Magazine, and writes for Deadspin, The Daily Beast, and The Advocate. He has previously contributed to Sports Illustrated, Details, Slate, Out, Boston Magazine, and others. He is the author of America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life, a narrative account of three years in the lives of eight men and women struggling with addictions, and American Voyeur: Dispatches From the Far Reaches of Modern Life, a collection of previously published writing. In an effort to get out of the house more, he teaches and speaks nationally on a variety of topics, including addiction, youth culture, and sex and sexuality. He’s currently working on his next book, about dogs and humans.
Sasha Frere-Jones is best known as the pop music critic for The New Yorker, where he has been since 2004, although he recently became the culture editor of The Daily, News Corporation’s iPad newspaper currently in development. He blogs at www.sashafrerejones.tumblr.com and plays in the bands Piñata and Calvinist.
Virginia Heffernan is a culture and media critic for the The New York Times. She has worked as a fact-checker for The New Yorker, a writer at VH1, an editor at Harper's and Talk, as well as served as TV critic for Slate. She also holds a doctorate in English literature from Harvard, wrote the Emmy-nominated Matthew's Murder for MTV, and has been anthologized (with co-writer and former roommate Mike Albo) in the comedic-monologue collection Extreme Exposure. In June 2002, the Columbia Journalism Review named Heffernan one of its "Ten Young Editors to Watch."
Steven Levy bootstrapped his way into journalism in 1975 and began writing about technology in 1981—the people who make it, and its effects on all of us. He’s been pursuing this fascinating story ever since. Before he joined Wired magazine as a full time writer in 2008, he was a freelancer and worked at Newsweek as senior editor, chief technology correspondent, and writer of a column called the Technologist. He’s written six books including Hackers, Crypto, and The Perfect Thing. His writing has appeared in a wide range of publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s and Premiere. He’s currently working on a book about Google, informed by a two-year deep dive into the company. It will appear in early 2011.
D.T. Max was born and raised in New York City and graduated from Harvard in 1984. He has been a book editor and a book review editor, most recently at the The New York Observer. For the past eight years, he has reported mostly for the New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine on everything from the quagga, an extinct relative of the zebra that a South African taxidermist tried to breed back to life, to the president’s speechwriters in the days after September 11th. His work has been anthologized in the Best American Science Writing 2006 and elsewhere. He is currently working on a biography of David Foster Wallace for Viking Press. He lives outside Washington D.C. with his wife, their two young children, and a rescued beagle who came to them named Max.
Matthew Power is a freelance print and radio journalist and a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine. He is a three-time finalist (2005, 2006, 2007) for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists in the International Reporting category, and a 2006 finalist for the Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism. He is the recipient of a 2005 Lowell Thomas/Society of American Travel Writers Gold Award for Best Land Travel Article, and a 2008 Bronze Award for Best Adventure Travel Article, and was a 2004 Non-Fiction Scholar at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His work is anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005, Best American Spiritual Writing 2006, Best American Travel Writing 2007, Best American Travel Writing 2009, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009, Best American Travel Writing 2010, and is reprinted in the textbook Writing as Surviving, Oxford University Press, 2007. He is a 2010-2011 Knight-Wallace Fellow.
Frank Rose writes about the future of media. He is the author of The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, about how the Internet is changing storytelling, to be published by Norton in February 2011. It was inspired by his work as a contributing editor at Wired. Earlier books include West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer; The Agency: William Morris and the Hidden History of Show Business; and Into the Heart of the Mind: An American Quest for Artificial Intelligence. He was a contributing writer at Fortune and Premiere, and contributing editor at Esquire and Travel + Leisure. He’s also written for The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, New York, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone.
Patrick Symmes is a writer and journalist who covers insurgencies, global environmental problems, travel, and the geopolitics that underlie them all, for magazines like Harper’s, Outside, and Condé Nast Traveler, as well as Newsweek, GQ, Wired, Mother Jones, The New York Times, and the Telegraph in London. He specializes in Latin America, particularly Cuba, but has worked from Patagonia to Phnom Penh, and Cape Town to Kazakhstan. He is the author of The Boys from Dolores (2007), about what happened to Fidel Castro’s own schoolmates, and Chasing Che, about riding his motorcycle across South America.