American journalist, author, playwright and teacher. He was a long-time columnist for Time magazine. He is currently a professor at Stony Brook Southampton.
His pieces for Time magazine have won two George Polk Awards, awards from the Overseas Press Club, the American Bar Association, and others. His television essays for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS have won the Peabody and the Emmy. His Time cover essay, “A Letter to the Year 2086,” was chosen for the time capsule placed inside the Statue of Liberty at its centennial. When he was writing a column for the Washington Post, Washingtonian magazine named him “Best Columnist in Washington.”
He is the author of 14 books, which have been published in 14 languages. They include the national bestseller, Rules for Aging; three collections of essays; and Children of War, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Unless it Moves the Human Heart, on the art of writing. His first novel, Lapham Rising was also a national bestseller, as was Making Toast, a book-length version of his December 2008 essay in The New Yorker, on the death of his daughter. He has written six off-Broadway plays including Ashley Montana Goes Ashore in the Caicos, and The Oldsmobiles, both produced at the Flea Theater.
His comic, one-person show, Free Speech in America, which he performed at the American Place Theater, was cited by the New York Times as one of the 10 best plays of 1991. In 2009 he was selected as one of three finalists for the Robert Cherry Award for the most distinguished university teachers in the country.
Link to Wikipedia biography