1. Ted Conover teaches graduate courses in the New York University Literary Reportage concentration, as well as undergraduate courses on the "journalism of empathy" and undercover reporting.
23 Facts About Ted Conover
1. 2.
Ted Conover was born in Okinawa, Japan and raised in Denver, Colorado.
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Ted Conover was a student at Hill Junior High School in Denver, where he gained his earliest journalism experiences.
4.
Ted Conover was a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University from 1982 to 1984 and received an honorary doctorate from Amherst College in 2001.
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In high school and during undergraduate summer breaks Ted Conover worked for Colorado newspapers such as the Aurora Sentinel and the Lakewood Sentinel.
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Ted Conover's first paid journalism writing assignments were local stories on high school sports, real estate development, and the opening of an American Furniture Warehouse.
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Ted Conover's senior thesis, "Between Freedom and Poverty: Railroad Tramps of the American West," was an ethnography of railroad hobos.
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Ted Conover published an article about this research in the Amherst student journal In Other Words.
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Ted Conover spent two years at Cambridge University after writing Rolling Nowhere.
10.
Ted Conover next applied his participatory research method in the setting of a wealthy subculture in the mining-town-turned-lifestyle-capital of Aspen, Colorado, where he worked as a driver for the Mellow Yellow Taxi Company, for a catering company, and as a reporter for the Aspen Times.
11.
Ted Conover's experiences were the basis for his 1991 book Whiteout: Lost in Aspen.
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Ted Conover moved to the East Coast in the 1990s and began writing for national publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine.
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Ted Conover sought this position after the New York State Department of Corrections denied his request to shadow the department's employees in a journalistic role.
14.
Ted Conover has explored additional subcultures and topics in articles for magazines such as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, T Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, Outside, Travel + Leisure, Smithsonian Magazine, and 5280.
15.
In 2016 Ted Conover published his book Immersion: A Writer's Guide To Going Deep as part of the University of Chicago Press Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing series.
16.
Ted Conover has performed several times on stage for The Moth and has been interviewed in podcasts and other forums.
17.
Ted Conover sits on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common based at Amherst College.
18.
Authors who have inspired Ted Conover include Walt Whitman, Jack London, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Stanley Booth, Bruce Chatwin, Anne Tyler, Anne Fadiman, and Tom Wolfe.
19.
Ted Conover advocates applying multidisciplinary research and narrative techniques to uncover the complexities of individual experience.
20.
Ted Conover began teaching writing at summer sessions including the Aspen Summer Words Festival, Writers at Work, the Santa Fe Writers Conference, the Sun Valley Writers Conference, and the Sarah Lawrence Summer Seminar for Writers.
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Ted Conover served on the nonfiction faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference nine times between 1989 and 2015, and taught at Bread Loaf in Sicily in 2017.
22.
Ted Conover served as the Institute's director from 2018 to 2021.
23.
Ted Conover identifies narrative structure and effective use of digression as two of the more challenging concepts to teach students.