Paul Tough

Paul Tough
Paul Tough at the 2012 Texas Book Festival.
Occupation	Author, broadcaster, journalist

Paul Tough (born 1967) is a Canadian-American writer and broadcaster. He is perhaps best known for authoring the works Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America and How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.

He grew up in Toronto and was educated at the University of Toronto Schools. As a teenager, he was co-host of Anybody Home, a weekly youth-oriented programme broadcast nationally on CBC Radio until the show's cancellation in 1983. He has also served as an editor of The New York Times Magazine.

Tough first moved to the United States in 1988 and worked for Harper's Magazine and then returned to radio becoming senior editor of This American Life in the mid-1990s before moving back to Canada to serve as editor of Saturday Night in 1998. By 2000, he had returned to the United States to found Open Letters, an online magazine.

He has written extensively about education, poverty and politics, including cover stories in the New York Times Magazine on the Harlem Children's Zone, the post-Katrina school system in New Orleans, the No Child Left Behind Act, and charter schools. He returned to This American Life in the early 2000s, where he reported, more recently, on the parents enrolled in the Harlem Children's Zone's Baby College. His writing has appeared in Slate, GQ, Esquire, and The New Yorker. He lives with his wife and son in New York City and Montauk, New York.