Author Bio
“When the Time Comes”
I grew up in a small factory town in southern New Jersey, where I was the bookworm with bifocals – such a cliché! – who wanted to be a writer. Specifically, after I read kiddie biographies of Joseph Pulitzer (as in Prizes) and Nellie Bly (famous daredevil woman journalist), I wanted to be a reporter.
I actually pulled this off: After graduating from Boston University and doing a year’s graduate work at Penn, I had a long career as a freelance writer for a slew of magazines and spent 16 happy years based in New York for the Washington Post. Now I help train the next generation of journalists as a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. I still write for a slew of publications, including the Washington Post Magazine and the New Old Age blog on nytimes.com. This is my first book.
I live in leafy-yet-sophisticated Montclair, N.J., a short train ride from Manhattan. And I’m the parent of a terrific daughter who’s also a writer and who lives -- where else? -- in Brooklyn.
