Gary M. Pomerantz

GARY M. POMERANTZ is an author and journalist whose most recent book, WILT, 1962, a period piece narrative about race, celebrity and Wilt Chamberlain's legendary 100-point game, was an Editors' Choice selection in 2005 by The New York Times Book Review.

Pomerantz spent 17 years as a daily journalist, first as a sportswriter for The Washington Post where he covered Georgetown University basketball and the Washington Redskins, and then at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution where he wrote about race, sports, culture and politics, and served for a time on the newspaper's editorial board.

His first book, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn (Scribner, 1996), a multi-generational biography of Atlanta and its racial conscience, was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and a finalist for Non-Fiction Book of the Year by the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tenn. The New York Times Sunday Book Review hailed Peachtree as "a magnificent piece of writing, a beautiful tapestry of prose in which the stories of two of Atlanta's most celebrated families have been woven densely into the history of the city itself."

His second book, Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds (Crown, 2001), about an air crash, has been published in Britain, Germany, and China, and was termed by The London Evening Standard "a flawlessly constructed narrative . . . a masterpiece in non-fiction story-telling."

A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor's degree in history, Pomerantz was named a Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan in 1987-88. There he studied theater and the Bible. He served from 1999-2001 as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at Emory University in Atlanta where he taught courses on news reporting and writing, and on the history of the American press. He will serve as Visiting Lecturer at Stanford this spring, teaching Communication 177S/277S, Specialized Writing & Reporting: Sports Journalism.

He has captured numerous journalism honors, including the Ernie Pyle Award for human interest writing from the Scripps Howard Foundation, and the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi national award for feature writing. Pomerantz also has been acknowledged by The American Editor magazine and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for distinguished writing about race relations.