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My Bio First things first: My last name is pronounced CRY-check. I am a writer, newspaper columnist, author and former journalism professor. In my spare time, I sing and play trombone in a busy blues/swing/oldies band based in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. (Click the "My Band" link for more details.) I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. I moved to New York City in the mid-1980s and now split time between the Catskill Mountains in New York and the Alabama Gulf Coast. I have an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University. I spent nearly 15 years as a newspaper reporter in the Midwest and New York City. In 1991, I joined the faculty at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. I returned to writing full time in 1998. I am a special correspondent for the New York Daily News, for which I write The Justice Story, a long-running Sunday crime feature. I am co-editor, with my colleague Test Gest, of Crime & Justice News, a daily digest of criminal justice stories that goes to 5,000 subscribers in the media, law enforcement and criminology worlds. I spent five years as a correspondent with Court TV's Crime Library, and I continue to focus on true crime themes in my work. I've published nonfiction stories in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Manchester (U.K.) Guardian and Mother Jones. I am the author of a nonfiction book, Scooped! Media Miss Real Story on Crime While Chasing Sex, Sleaze, and Celebrities, published by Columbia University Press. (Click on the Book link for more information.) In recent years I've turned to writing fiction, spurred in part by an arts fellowship at a mountaintop writer's retreat in 2001. My first published piece, a short story entitled Sutphin Blvd., was included in a 2004 anthology of 13 stories published by Midnight Mind Press in New York. In 2005, another of my short stories, Bluefish, was selected for performance by Literally Speaking, an Albany, N.Y., program similar to NPR's "Selected Shorts" program. I am under contract on a true crime book, due out in 2011, and am in the process of publishing a collection of my Justice Story pieces under the title "Murder, American-Style." (The Helen Zimmerman Agency of New Paltz, N.Y., is my literary agent.) I'm a busy writer, but I am also an inveterate pursuer of hobbies. My band, the Blues Maneuver, plays about 50 gigs a year. I also enjoy tennis, golf, bird-hunting, downhill skiing and fly-fishing. |