Ted Conover
| Ted Conover | |
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photo by Ralph Gabriner
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| Born |
January 17, 1958 Okinawa, Japan |
| Occupation | Author, Journalist |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Manual High School (Denver), Amherst College, Cambridge University |
| Website | |
| www |
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Ted Conover (born January 17, 1958 in Okinawa and raised in Denver, Colorado) is an American author and journalist. A graduate of Denver's Manual High School and Amherst College and a Marshall Scholar, he is also a professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University. He teaches graduate courses in the Literary Reportage concentration and an undergraduate courses on journalism and empathy and undercover reporting.
Conover's books of narrative nonfiction have typically been researches of little-known social groups. He will often become an active participant with the subculture he is writing about. His first experiment with this melding of anthropological and journalistic method occurred during 1980, when he rode freight railroads back and forth across the western United States with some of the last remaining hobos. This experience, initially rendered as an ethnography for an honors thesis, became the basis of his first-person book, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes (1984).
Some of those people Conover met on the rails were Mexican nationals, and in his next book, Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Illegal Migrants (1987), he turned his attention to illegal immigrants, describing them as "the true modern-day incarnation of the classic American hobo." Conover spent a year traveling with Mexicans in order to write Coyotes; he lived in a "feeder" valley in the Mexican state of Querétaro, spent time in Arizona, Idaho, California, and Florida, and crossed the border three times. The 1987 book was published in a new edition during 2006 with a new preface and subtitle: "A Journey Across Borders With America's Mexican Migrants."
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Wikipedia