Ted Conover

Ted Conover (born January 17, 1958)About the Author: Ted Conover '80
Amherst College — Featured Book of the Month. Retrieved on February 22, 2022. is an American author and journalist who has been called a "master of immersion" and "master of experience-based narrative nonfiction.""Travel Writer: Ted Conover"
January 1, 2011, citin
Publishers Marketplace ''Publisher’s Lunch''
A graduate of Amherst College and a former Marshall Scholar, he is also a professor and past director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University."A Letter from Ted Conover"
New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute ''News Post''. JUNE 19, 2020. Accessed February 22, 2022. He teaches graduate courses in the New York University Literary Reportage concentration, as well as undergraduate courses on the "journalism of empathy" and undercover reporting.Biographical info from ''The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft'' by Robert S. Boynton (2005), pp. 3–30.

Early life and education

Ted Conover was born in Okinawa, Japan and raised in Denver, Colorado.Milofsky, David
"Book Beat: Conover’s Colorado roots"
''The Denver Post''. July 1, 2010. Accessed February 22, 2022. He was a student at Hill Junior High School in Denver, where he gained his earliest journalism experiences. He went on to attend Denver's George Washington High School and then enrolled at Manual High School after court-ordered desegregation resulted in school reassignments—a development that contributed to his early interests in research experiences that cross social, cultural, and geographical borders (see Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver).Mulcahy, Joanne B
"Diving Deep: An Interview With Ted Conover"
''Creative Nonfiction''. Issue 63. Accessed February 24, 2022. Conover finished high school in 1976 and went on to graduate ''summa cum laude'' with a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Amherst College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.Ted Conover
The Future of Journalism Education. Accessed February 25, 2022. He was a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University from 1982 to 1984 and received an honorary doctorate from Amherst College in 2001.
''Newsworthy''. Accessed February 25, 2022.

Career

Early journalism experiences

Conover first began looking for ways to combine creative writing and journalism by writing articles for the Hill Junior High newspaper, ''Torch''. For one ''Torch'' article, he interviewed actor Lloyd Haynes by means of a fortuitous encounter in Aspen, Colorado during a family ski trip. This article earned Conover his first front-page news feature and much attention from his classmates. In high school and during undergraduate summer breaks Conover worked for Colorado newspapers such as the '' Aurora Sentinel'' and the '' Lakewood Sentinel''.Porter, William
"Immersion journalist Ted Conover to be honored"
''The Denver Post''. April 7, 2011. Accessed February 22, 2022. His first paid journalism writing assignments were local stories on high school sports, real estate development, and the opening of an American Furniture Warehouse. He and a friend rode bicycles from Seattle to New Jersey the summer before they began college in Massachusetts.Conover, Ted
"Finishing"
''Bicycling!''. May 1980. Accessed March 12, 2022. For a personal essay class the next year, he described the final hour of that journey; the professor liked it and Conover pitched it to '' Bicycling! Magazine''. The resulting article, "Finishing", was his first freelance sale, according to Conover.

Conover took a magazine internship at '' U.S. News & World Report'' during his junior year at Amherst College, which led him to think he "might have a place in that profession." He credits anthropology courses he took at Amherst with adding rigor and depth to both his thinking and his journalistic writing. His senior thesis, "Between Freedom and Poverty: Railroad Tramps of the American West," was an ethnography of railroad hobos. He published an article about this research in the Amherst student journal ''In Other Words''.Kroeger, Brooke. (2012).''Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception''. Northwestern University Press: Evanston, Illinois. The article was reprinted in the Amherst alumni magazine, where it caught the attention of a wire service reporter in Springfield, Massachusetts who then interviewed Conover about the article. The reporter's article led to appearances on ''The Today Show'' and National Public Radio. This publicity enabled Conover to catch the attention of New York literary agent Sterling Lord, who had helped launch the career of Jack Kerouac.Heilpern, John
"Out to Lunch with Sterling Lord"
''Vanity Fair''. February 2013. Accessed February 22, 2022. Lord represented Conover for his first book, '' Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes'', which was based on Conover's undergraduate research.

Writing career

Conover spent two years at Cambridge University after writing '' Rolling Nowhere''. Building on his encounters while riding the rails with Mexican undocumented immigrants whom he described as "the true modern-day incarnation of the classic American hobo," Conover next spent a year traveling with Mexican migrants as research for what would become his 1987 book ''Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants''.Conover, Ted. ''Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Illegal Migrants''. 1987. Vintage Books, NY. During this year, he lived in a "feeder" valley in the Mexican state of Querétaro, spent time in Arizona, Idaho, California, and Florida, and crossed the US-Mexico border three times.

Conover next applied his participatory research method in the setting of a wealthy subculture in the mining-town-turned-lifestyle-capital of Aspen, Colorado, where he worked as a driver for the Mellow Yellow Taxi Company, for a catering company, and as a reporter for the Aspen Times."Whiteout: Lost in Aspen"
''Publishers Weekly''. November 4, 1991. Accessed February 24, 2022.Conover, Ted. ''Whiteout: Lost in Aspen''. 1991. Vintage Books, NY.Sieg, Stina
"A Short History Of How Aspen Became The Glitzy Playground Of The Rich"
Colorado Public Radio. March 25, 2019. Accessed February 24, 2022. His experiences were the basis for his 1991 book ''Whiteout: Lost in Aspen''.

He moved to the East Coast in the 1990s and began writing for national publications such as ''The New Yorker'' and ''The New York Times Magazine''.Oder, Norman
"In the Belly of the Beast: Ted Conover"
''Publishers Weekly''. Accessed February 24, 2022. In the mid-1990s, amidst skyrocketing rates of incarceration, he applied for work as a New York State corrections officer.Bergner, Daniel
"Up the River"
''New York Times''. May 14, 2000. Accessed February 24, 2022. He sought this position after the New York State Department of Corrections denied his request to shadow the department's employees in a journalistic role. Hired in 1997, Conover went through seven weeks of corrections officer training in Albany, New York and then spent nearly a year working at Sing Sing prison in various entry-level custody posts throughout the prison. After resigning, Conover presented his research and observations in an article for ''The New Yorker''Conover, Ted
"Guarding Sing Sing"
''New York Times''. March 26, 2000. Accessed February 24, 2022. and in his 2000 book '' Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing''. ''Newjack'' was awarded the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award