Advanced Creative Nonfiction

Kurt Pitzer is an author and journalist who has written extensively for the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, The Sunday Times of London, The New York Times, BBC Radio, People, and Mother Jones. As a foreign correspondent, he has reported from many regions during armed conflicts, including the Balkans, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the winner of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize for his reporting in Kosovo, Serbia, and Bosnia. During the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, he helped the former head of Saddam Hussein's nuclear centrifuge program, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, escape with his family to the United States. Their co-written book, The Bomb in My Garden (Wiley, 2004), was called "never less than riveting" by The New York Times Book Review. "You start reading, and you don't want to stop," wrote James Fallows in The Atlantic Monthly. Pitzer wrote Eating With the Enemy (St. Martin's Press, 2010) about a New Jersey BBQ chef who became an unlikely liaison between the US and North Korea. It was called "A boisterous, improbable book" (The New York Times) and "A masterwork of pace, structure and voice" (Maclean's). He is the producer of the acclaimed narrative feature film Runoff. Pitzer received his BA from Wesleyan University and his MFA in fiction from the New York University Creative Writing Program, where he was a Fromer fellow. He leads workshops at the US Department of Veterans Affairs for veterans seeking mental health services for trauma. His poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have been published in literary journals such as the Denver Quarterly, Fourteen Hills, Gris-Gris, and Pleiades.