Gary Pomerantz

Gary Pomerantz at Mill Valley Public Library, CA. ©Susanne Lareau Maxwell

Gary M. Pomerantz (born November 17, 1960) is an American journalist and nonfiction author who lectures in the Graduate Program in Journalism at Stanford University.^[1] His books include Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn (1996 New York Times Notable Book of the Year),^[2] a multi-generational biography of Atlanta and its racial conscience told through the families of Atlanta Mayors Maynard Jackson and Ivan Allen Jr., and Their Life’s Work (2013), a narrative about the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers dynasty that follows that storied team across the decades and examines football’s gifts and costs.

Early life

Pomerantz was born in N. Tarrytown, NY, the youngest of three boys. His family moved to Orlando when he was a boy, and then to Los Angeles in 1971. He studied history at the University of California, Berkeley, served for a time as sports editor of the student newspaper, The Daily Californian, and graduated in 1982.

Career

He spent nearly two decades as a daily journalist. In 1981, he followed John Feinstein and Michael Wilbon as a summer intern in the sports department at The Washington Post. At The Post, he covered the Washington Redskins, Georgetown University basketball ^[3] and the National Football League. In 1987-1988, he served as a Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan, studying theater and the Bible. He then moved to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution where, for the next 11 years, he wrote social and political profiles, special projects, columns and served on the newspaper’s editorial board.

His five nonfiction books feature a broad array of topics. Nine Minutes Twenty Seconds (2001), about the crash of Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 7529, was also published in China, Germany and Britain. In WILT, 1962 (2005), Pomerantz recreates the legendary night when basketball star Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game against the New York Knicks in Hershey, Pa. Named an Editors’ Choice book by The New York Times,^[4] WILT, 1962 was called by Entertainment Weekly “a meticulous and engaging narrative – a slam dunk of a read.^[5]” The Devil’s Tickets (Crown/Random House, 2009) is a true-crime thriller set in a bygone age when the card game of bridge was all the rage. The Devil's Tickets evokes the last echoes of the Roaring 20s and the darkness of the Depression when a suave and cunning Russian-born American named Ely Culbertson became the Barnum of a bridge craze that fueled marital uproar across the nation, including a husband-killing and sensational trial in Kansas City.

His most recent book, Their Life’s Work, was short-listed for the 2014 PEN/ESPN Award ^[6] for Literary Sports Writing.

From 1999-2001 Pomerantz served as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at Emory University in Atlanta. For the past eight years at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., he has taught courses on specialized reporting and writing.^[7]

Personal life

He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, and their three children.

Books

• Pomerantz, Gary M. (1996). Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: A Saga of Race and Family (1st ed.). Scribner's. ISBN 0684807173. 
• Pomerantz, Gary M. (2001). Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds: The Tragedy & Triumph of ASA Flight 529 (1st ed.). Crown Publishers. ISBN 0609606336. 
• Pomerantz, Gary M. (2005). WILT, 1962: The Night of 100 Points and the Dawn of a New Era 529 (1st ed.). Crown Publishers. ISBN 1400051606. 
• Pomerantz, Gary M. (2009). The Devil’s Tickets: A Night of Bridge, a Fatal Hand, and a New American Age (1st ed.). Crown Publishers. ISBN 1400051622. 
• Pomerantz, Gary M. (2013). Their Life's Work: The Brotherhood of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers, Then and Now (1st ed.). Simon & Schuster. ISBN 1451691629. 

See also

• Bridge Murder case

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Gary Pomerantz.

• Official website
• Stanford University Department of Communication
• "Their Life's Work" Interview, KD/PG Sunday Edition appearance on Pittsburgh television. (audio-video)
• "Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds" interview, CNN Sunday Morning (audio-video)
• Gary M. Pomerantz at Library of Congress Authorities, with 4 catalog records