Jonathan Coleman
Jonathan Coleman is the author of five critically acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction, three of which were New York Times bestsellers. His most recent, WEST BY WEST: My Charmed, Tormented Life--which the writer Gay Talese praised as “exceptional” and “powerful” and The New Yorker called “deeply thoughtful in a way rare among books by former athletes”--is a collaboration with the legendary Jerry West, the silhouetted figure of the NBA logo. It was published by Little, Brown, was featured in Sports Illustrated, and instantly became a New York Times bestseller. It was named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by the Los Angeles Times and one of the two best nonfiction books of the year by the Institute for International Sport. All of the research and interviews related to this book are part of the Jerry West Collection at West Virginia University. Mr. Coleman, a Contributing Editor of The Sunday Long Read, was recently the Nancy Schaenen Scholar at the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University, and he has been an adviser to RISE, the Ross Initiative for Sports and Equality, which uses the broad platform of sports as a means to achieve greater harmony in race relations and a higher level of social justice.
His previous book, LONG WAY TO GO: Black and White in America, has been called “a classic” (Morris Dees, Southern Poverty Law Center), “history and journalism at its best” (Andrew Hacker, author of Two Nations) and received front-page reviews in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, and the Chicago Tribune. In addition, Mr. Coleman traveled throughout the country, taking part in symposiums that centered on the book and the subject of race; served as an adviser to President Clinton’s Initiative on Race as well as an adviser on racial unity to Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign; and he wrote speeches for the NAACP during Julian Bond’s tenure as chairman. (All of Mr. Coleman’s research and interviews related to Long Way to Go can be found at the Golda Meir Library of the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.)
Mr. Coleman was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the University of Virginia with distinction. He began his career in London, working for The New Review, a literary magazine. He then came to New York and worked in book publishing, first at Alfred A. Knopf and later as a senior editor and the youngest editor ever appointed to the editorial board of Simon and Schuster. Among the books he edited were Peter Taylor’s In the Miro District, Robert Lindsey’s The Falcon and the Snowman, Jeffrey Archer’s Kane and Abel, Don Imus’s God’s Other Son, David S. Broder’s Changing of the Guard, Elizabeth Drew’s Senator, William S. Cohen’s Roll Call, Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory and Arabia, Shiva Naipaul’s North of South and Journey to Nowhere, Fred Kaplan’s The Wizards of Armageddon, Richard Norton Smith’s Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, and Donald Johanson’s Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind. In a piece about publishing in Time magazine, he was profiled as one of the best editors in the field.
From publishing he moved to CBS News, where he worked as a producer and then as a correspondent and where he initially began to investigate the story that led to his first book, AT MOTHER'S REQUEST. Published in 1985, it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and made the New York Times bestseller list in both hardcover and paperback. Favorably compared by the critics to such books as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, it was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award and given a Special Citation. (All of Coleman’s research related to At Mother’s Request is with the Marriott Library at the University of Utah.) In 1987, a miniseries based on his book aired on CBS, and he made a cameo appearance.
In the fall of 1989, his second book, EXIT THE RAINMAKER, was a featured selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and was praised by Time (“Striking”), The New York Times Book Review (“Fascinating”), and The Los Angeles Times Book Review (“A fascinating symbolic statement of the American psyche”). In addition, he wrote a profile of Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Civil Rights Memorial, for Time. In 1990, when Exit the Rainmaker was published in paperback, it became a New York Times bestseller.
In 1991, Coleman wrote a piece on Little League that was subsequently cited for Special Mention in Best American Sports Writing 1992. Over the years his articles have covered a variety of subjects: the world’s largest Polaroid camera; the water towers of Manhattan; the mysterious drowning of three black teenagers in Texas on Juneteenth; the way in which technology has made us “intimate strangers”; a small parking problem that John Grisham made a big deal over; profiles of Don Imus, Jeff Sonnenfeld (which answers, among other things, the question of whether he vandalized the business school building at Emory in retaliation for not being offered the deanship), the young soccer phenom Rose Lavelle, and the U.S. Women’s National soccer team; remembrances of the director and composer Elizabeth Swados and of the Emile Griffith-Benny “Kid” Paret fight (the one in which Paret was killed), which he attended at the age of ten.
Mr. Coleman is a member of PEN and is included in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Education, and Contemporary Authors. He has written for the New York Times (both the Magazine and Book Review), Newsweek, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Sports Illustrated, the Washington Post (both Style and Book World), the Chicago Tribune, the Texas Observer, among other publications. He taught advanced creative nonfiction writing at the University of Virginia for many years, and has lectured at Princeton, Yale, Penn, Columbia, and a number of other universities as well as at Chautauqua, the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, the 92nd St. Y, the Auburn Avenue Research Library in Atlanta, the Milwaukee Public Library, the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, Writers at Work, the Miami Book Fair, the Nebraska Summer Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Festival of the Book, and Semester at Sea. Over the course of his career, he has been interviewed on most of the major television and radio shows, including Today, Oprah, Larry King Live, Good Morning America, Vanished, 48 Hours, All Things Considered, Inside Edition, Court TV’s Power, Privilege and Justice, and has been profiled in nearly every major newspaper. In addition, he narrates documentaries—for which he has won three awards—and audiobooks, and does other forms of voiceover work.
Mr. Coleman has recently returned to New York City to live (and is in the midst of writing a piece about it, reflecting on the various ways he feels the city—and he—have changed). His e-book, CROSSING THE LINE: How One Incident in a Girls’ Soccer Match Rippled Across Small-Town America, was excerpted in Vice Sports and has just been translated into Arabic, one of the first examples of longform literary nonfiction writing to be introduced to the Middle East (the first being Gay Talese's "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold"). He is currently finishing a book about Angus Cameron, the renowned book editor (and “true Renaissance man”) who was blacklisted in the 1950s, a book that draws on their relationship of more than twenty-five years: WHAT HE STOOD FOR: The Courage and Many Worlds of Angus Cameron.
jonathancoleman64@gmail.com; jonacoles@aol.com
347-285-1418
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