Gary M. Pomerantz
Gary M. Pomerantz is a nonfiction author and journalist. His fourth and most recent book, The Devil’s Tickets (Crown, 2009) is a narrative from the Roaring Twenties about a sensational killing and murder trial in Kansas City and the contract bridge craze that swept America. National Public Radio hails it as “deliciously detailed and splendidly written.” The Kansas City Star writes, “This is history with a whole lineup of compelling characters . . . Pomerantz handles it all with a stirring sense of story and human behavior."
Pomerantz spent 17 years as a daily journalist, first as a sportswriter for The Washington Post where he covered Georgetown University basketball and the National Football League, 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 third book, WILT, 1962, a story about race, celebrity and basketball star Wilt Chamberlain’s legendary 100-point game, returned him to his sportswriting roots, and was an Editors’ Choice selection in 2005 by The New York Times Book Review.
This winter at Stanford, Pomerantz will teach COMM 177S / 277S, a course on Specialized Reporting & Writing about Sports.
Pomerantz’s 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. His next 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 of non-fiction storytelling."
A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in history, Pomerantz was named as a Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan in 1987-88. Later 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 arrived at Stanford in spring 2007.
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 by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for distinguished writing about race relations.