Ted Conover is the author of four books of nonfiction, including 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. A summa cum laude graduate of Amherst College (1981) in anthropology, Conover spent two years at Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar (1982-84). 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. A contributor to publications including The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, he is researching a new nonfiction book about a handful of roads around the world and the costs and benefits of connectedness.

He teaches the Journalism of Empathy (syllabus) at New York University.

Selections from interview with Sarah Hart in January, 2008:

“There’s such potential for artistry in covering current events—but it’s still mostly an untapped potential.”

“Working hard to understand someone else’s point of view is one of the best things journalists can do.”

“Creative thinking doesn’t always go with orthodox practice.”

“There's some necessary teaching of rules. But too much of it and I worry that students risk losing their voice, their take, their initiative.”

“What makes Journalism interesting is that someone is always trying something new. Someone is always asking an outrageous question. Journalism is most dynamic when people think outside the box.”