Doug Merlino is an American author and journalist.
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Merlino grew up in Seattle, Washington and attended the Lakeside School.[1] He studied government at Claremont McKenna College[2] in Los Angeles, and received graduate degrees in journalism and international affairs from the University of California, Berkeley.[3] He lived in Budapest, Hungary, where he worked as an editor at the Budapest Business Journal.[4] He is married and now lives in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City.[5]
Merlino has worked for publications including Slate, Wired, Men's Journal, the Budapest Business Journal, and the Seattle Times.[6] He reported on post-genocide reconciliation in Rwanda for the PBS show Frontline/World.[7]
Merlino's first book, The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White,[8] was published by Bloomsbury USA in January 2011. The nonfiction book tells the story of a basketball team that Merlino played on as a 14-year-old in the 1986.[9] The team, an integration experiment, mixed privileged white players from Merlino's private school with African-American kids from Seattle's Central Area. The boys won an AAU championship that season, and the organizers began a program to enroll some of the black players in private schools.[10]
Several years later Merlino learned that Tyrell Johnson, one of his African-American teammates, had been murdered and dismembered.[11] This spurred him to track down the remaining players to find out what happened to them, and how they looked back at their team. They include a hedge fund manager, a Pentecostal preacher, a prosecutor, a frequently incarcerated cocaine addict, a winemaker, and a street hustler.[12][13] The resulting book tells the story of these individuals, but also focuses on the shifting dynamics of race and class, manhood, education and gentrification over the last thirty years.[14] Many of the players and coaches from the team reunited in January 2011 for a televised panel discussion that coincided with the release of the book.[15]
Merlino received the 2011 Washington State Book Award in Biography/Memoir for The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White.[16]