Alex Kotlowitz

Alex Kotlowitz is an award-winning American journalist and author.

Kotlowitz, an author, journalist and filmmaker, was raised in New York City, the son of former New York public television executive and former Harper's Magazine editor Robert Kotlowitz. Kotlowitz received his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University and is an alumnus of the Ragdale Foundation. He currently lives with his family just outside Chicago in the suburb of Oak Park.

Kotlowitz is the author of There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America, The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death and America's Dilemma and Never a City So Real, among other works. There Are No Children Here, a national bestseller, is the winner of the Carl Sandburg Award, a Christopher Award, and the Helen B. Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism.The New York Public Library selected this work as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century. In 1993, it was adapted as a television movie produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. The Other Side of the River received the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction. Both books were selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the year. Of "Never a City So Real", one critic wrote, "It's a fine successor to Nelson Algren's "Chicago: City on the Make" as a song to our rough-and-tumble, broken-nosed city.

Kotlowitz, a Wall Street Journal staff writer from 1984 to 1993, has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Public Radio International’s This American Life. His articles have also appeared in Granta, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic and The New Republic. His work has also been included in numerous anthologies -- and on PBS's FRONTLINE and NPR's "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition." His play, "An Unobstructed View" (co-authored with Amy Drozdowska) premiered in Chicago in June of 2005.

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