Ted Conover (born January 17, 1958) is an American author and journalist who has been called a "master of immersion" and "master of experience-based narrative nonfiction." A graduate of Amherst College and a former Marshall Scholar,, where he taught graduate courses in the Literary Reportage concentration, as well as undergraduate courses on the "journalism of empathy" and undercover reporting.
Early life and education
Ted Conover was born in Okinawa, Japan and raised in Denver, Colorado. He was a student at Hill Junior High School in Denver, where he gained his earliest journalism experiences. He went on to attend Denver's George Washington High School and then enrolled at Manual High School after court-ordered desegregation resulted in school reassignments—a development that contributed to his early interests in research experiences that cross social, cultural, and geographical borders (see Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver). Conover finished high school in 1976 He was a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University from 1982 to 1984 and received an honorary doctorate from Amherst College in 2001.
Career
thumb|border|alt=Ted Conover in early 20s with sparse beard, collar-length hair, cap, and hobo traveling clothes and gear, standing on a sidewalk with two other railroad hobo men carrying gear|Ted Conover - Rolling Nowhere
Early journalism experiences
Conover first began looking for ways to combine creative writing and journalism by writing articles for the Hill Junior High newspaper, Torch. For a personal essay class the next year, he described the final hour of that journey; the professor liked the piece and Conover pitched it to Bicycling! Magazine. The article was reprinted in the Amherst alumni magazine, where it caught the attention of a wire service reporter in Springfield, Massachusetts who then interviewed Conover about the article. Lord represented Conover for his first book, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes, which was based on Conover's undergraduate research. His experiences were the basis for his 1991 book Whiteout: Lost in Aspen.
thumb|border|left|alt=Ted Conover in his late 30s, standing outside of the prison perimeter wall wearing his correctional officer uniform hat and button-up shirt, with officer's notebook and pen in his shirt pockets|Ted Conover outside Sing Sing
He moved to the East Coast in the 1990s and began writing for national publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. In the mid-1990s, amidst skyrocketing rates of incarceration, he applied for work as a New York State corrections officer. He sought this position after the New York State Department of Corrections denied his request to shadow the department's employees in a journalistic role. and more fully in his 2000 book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. and was a finalist for the 2001 Journalism General Nonfiction category of the Pulitzer Prize. The book was initially banned by the New York State Department of Corrections and could be confiscated from prisoner mail, but was later allowed on the condition that pages considered a threat to security be redacted prior to prisoners receiving the book. As of 2019, Newjack was still banned in Arizona, Kansas, and Missouri state prisons.
thumb|border|alt=Ted Conover stands with a Kenyan man next to a large industrial truck parked on a dirt road while a younger Kenyan man and little boy look on.|Ted Conover with Kenyan truck driver
Conover's work for his next book—his 2011 The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World—focused on a central theme as observed across multiple continents: the role of roads and connectedness in shaping different aspects of human society. His research for this book took him to the Andes, East Africa and West Africa, the Middle East, China, and the Himalayas.
thumb|border|alt=Ted Conover stands with two Chinese women and one Chinese man. Behind them are the Yangtze River, the Three Gorges Dam, several large construction cranes, and misty hills. Buildings dot the area around the base of the hills. |Ted Conover at Three Gorges Dam
In 2016 Conover published his book Immersion: A Writer's Guide To Going Deep as part of the University of Chicago Press Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing series. In this book he focuses on the approach to writing he has developed over three decades of his career, touching on the practical and ethical challenges of immersive reporting, and citing examples from his own work and that of other writers such as Sebastian Junger, Anne Fadiman, Susan Orlean, and Jon Krakauer. During the autumn of 2012, Conover worked as a United States Department of Agriculture inspector and wrote about his beef inspection work at the Cargill Meat Solutions plant in Schuyler, Nebraska in the May 2013 issue of Harper's Magazine.
In August 2019 Harper's also published his long-form journalism piece "The Last Frontier: Homesteaders on the Margins of America." It recounts his work as a rural outreach volunteer in Colorado’s expansive San Luis Valley for a local group called La Puente. That was the beginning of his most recent book, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge (Knopf, 2022). Conover bought a small camper trailer and for two years rented space for it on a corner of a five-acre lot owned by the Gruber family, who were raising five daughters on the prairie. Eventually he bought his own five acres and set to work fixing up an old mobile home that had been abandoned there. “My investment wasn’t very large, but it did mark a big change in my status, at least in my mind, from frequent visitor to, well, neighbor,” he wrote. Cheap Land Colorado was named one of the Best Books of 2022 by The New Yorker and one of “50 Notable Works of Nonfiction 2022” by The Washington Post.
thumb|border|alt=Ted Conover wears a hairnet, a USDA hardhat, and a USDA inspector uniform while standing in front of a dressing room locker.|Ted Conover as meat inspector
Conover has performed several times on stage for The Moth and has been interviewed in podcasts and other forums. He sits on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common based at Amherst College.
Immersion approach
Conover expresses commitment to academic and journalistic rigor but also embraces some degree of experimentation in nonfiction writing, stating that "[l]iterature stays alive when it's open to new approaches." For example, in Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing Conover intersperses ethnographic and memoir-style observations from his work at Sing Sing prison with anecdotes of early American penological history to elucidate the social forces that have shaped American prisons over time. Conover states he is "proud that Newjack found readers both among prison reform advocates and corrections officers," illustrating his interest in creating works of writing that appeal to readers and experts from diverse backgrounds. A description of a Journalism of Empathy course taught by Conover at New York University reads:
In his 2016 book Immersion: A Writer's Guide to Going Deep Conover discusses balancing the truth-seeking duties of a reporter with the more personalized narrative styles of memoir and empathetic journalism. He served on the nonfiction faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference nine times between 1989 and 2015, and taught at Bread Loaf in Sicily in 2017. In 2005 he took a position as Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University. In 2013 he was named Associated Professor and in 2017 Full Professor. Conover served as the Institute's director from 2018 to 2021. In 2021 he received the Golden Dozen teaching award from NYU's College of Arts and Sciences. Conover has also taught courses for the University of Oregon and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
- Visiting fellow at Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics (2000)
- Guggenheim Fellowship (2003)
thumb|alt=Screenshot of 2021 Jeopardy reference to Conover's work|Screenshot of 2021 [[Jeopardy! reference to Conover's work]]
Jeopardy!
Conover's work has twice been an answer on the television game show Jeopardy!:
- On October 26, 2021, the category was "Literary Journalism" and the answer came from Rolling Nowhere.
- On October 15, 2003, the answer was drawn from Newjack and appeared in the category "Tough Jobs".
Written works
Books
- Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes (1984)
- Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (1987)
- Whiteout: Lost In Aspen (1991)
- Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (2000)
- The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World (2010)
- Immersion: A Writer's Guide to Going Deep (2016)
- Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge (2022)
Notable articles
Conover has published over seventy articles.