The DeWitt Wallace Center is honored to host two veteran New York Times columnists, and longtime chroniclers of American Life- Dan Barry and Peter Applebome!
We have a few spots available. RSVP if you’d like to join a small group lunch on Thursday, February 21, at noon.
Dan Barry, columnist and reporter, author of “This Land” and “About New York” columns
Dan Barry is a longtime columnist and reporter for The New York Times and the author of four books, including the newly released “The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland.” This critically acclaimed book tells the story of dozens of men with intellectual disability who spent decades working at an Iowa turkey-processing plant, living in an old schoolhouse, and enduring exploitation and abuse – before finding justice and achieving freedom. As the “This Land” columnist for the Times, Barry traveled to all 50 states, where he met the coroner from “The Wizard of Oz,” learned the bump-and-grind from a mostly retired burlesque queen, and was hit in the chest by an Asian carp leaping out of the Illinois River. He has since recovered — though the condition of the carp remains unknown.
He has reported extensively on many topics, including the World Trade Center disaster and its aftermath and the damage to the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He has also been the City Hall bureau chief, the Long Island bureau chief, a sportswriter, a general assignment reporter, and, for three years, the “About New York” columnist – all for the Times. Barry previously worked for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn., and for The Providence Journal, where he and two other reporters won a George Polk Award for an investigation into the causes of a state banking crisis. In 1994, he and the other members of the Journal’s investigative team won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles about Rhode Island’s court system; the series led to various reforms and the criminal indictment of the chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court. Sports writers might want to check out Barry’s “Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game,” which received the 2012 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing.
Peter Applebome ’71, recently retired deputy national editor at The New York Times; adjunct instructor at Duke teaching PJMS 390S-10 “Reporting American Voices”
@Applebome
Futrell Award winner Peter Applebome reflects on 40 years of ‘telling tales’ by Daniela Flamini
Applebome has been a reporter for the paper since 1987. He has held several different positions at the Times, and was for many years responsible for the paper’s “Our Towns” column, which produces biweekly dispatches from places in New York, New Jersey or Connecticut. Before taking over “Our Towns,”, he served as the Houston bureau chief, the Southern bureau chief in Atlanta, the chief education correspondent and the assistant metropolitan editor.
While working as a reporter, Applebome also published two books. His first book, Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture, is what The Washington Post called “one of the best portrayals of the South in years.” His second book, a personal narrative recounting his experience as father to a Boy Scout, is titled Scout’s Honor: A Father’s Unlikely Foray into the Woods. The New York Times Book Review called it “lively and lighthearted.”
Before joining the Times, Applebome filled reporter, editor and columnist roles at several news organizations in Texas, including The Corpus Christi Caller-Times, The Dallas Morning News and Texas Monthly magazine. Prior to that, he started his career with Ypsilanti Press in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
At Duke, Applebome worked on The Chronicle staff for four years before graduating with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1971. He went on to earn a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 1974, where he won the Harrington Award, the highest graduate student award offered by the Medill School of Journalism. He is now teaching a journalism course in the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke.