Kai Bird
| Kai Bird | |
|---|---|
Kai Bird in 2013
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| Born | 1951 (age 65–66) Eugene, Oregon, United States |
| Occupation | Biographer, columnist |
| Alma mater |
Carleton College Northwestern University |
| Spouse | Susan Goldmark |
| Website | |
| www |
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Kai Bird (born September 2, 1951) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning author and columnist, best known for his biographies of political figures.
Bird was born in 1951 in Eugene, Oregon. His father was a U.S. Foreign Service officer, and Bird spent his childhood in Jerusalem, Beirut, Dhahran, Cairo, and Mumbai. His father named him after Kai-Yu Hsu, a refugee from Communist China he met at the University of Oregon. Kai means "mustard" in Mandarin Chinese, and "Kai-Yu" suggests somebody who adds spice to life.
Bird finished high school in 1969 at Kodaikanal International School in Tamil Nadu, South India. He received his BA from Carleton College in 1973 and a M.S. in journalism from Northwestern University in 1975. Bird now lives in New York City with his wife, Susan Goldmark, a retired country director of the World Bank, and their son, Joshua.
In January 2017, Bird was appointed Executive Director and Distinguished Lecturer at CUNY Graduate Center's Leon Levy Center for Biography in New York City. He is presently working on a biography of President Jimmy Carter, under contract to Crown Books/Random House.
After graduation from Carleton, Bird received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which enables students to do a year of independent study outside the United States. He used the fellowship to do a photojournalism project in Yemen. Two years later, Goldmark was also awarded a Watson Fellowship, and the two of them spent 15 months as freelance journalists traveling through Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. "We filed weekly stories with papers like the Christian Science Monitor and Hong Kong’s Far Eastern Economic Review," Bird says. "We hardly made any money, but we enjoyed what we were doing." Bird was an associate editor of The Nation magazine from 1978 to 1982 and then a Nation columnist.
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