Bio

Walt Harrington was a staff writer for The Washington Post Magazine for nearly 15 years. His latest book, “The Everlasting Stream: A True Story of Rabbits, Guns, Friendship, and Family,” was just published by Atlantic Monthly Press. It is the story of what Harrington, as a classic upwardly mobile city slicker, learned during his 15 years of rabbit hunting with his father-in-law and his Kentucky country friends. Harrington is also the author of “Crossings: A White Man’s Journey Into Black America,” the story of his 25,000-mile excursion through black America. The book was awarded the Gustavus Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in the United States. Harrington is also the author of “American Profiles: Somebodies and Nobodies Who Matter” and “At the Heart of It: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives.” His work is included in the prestigious anthologies, “Literary Journalism” and “Literary Nonfiction.” Harrington’s book, “Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life,” is a guide for journalists wishing to write literary journalism stories about ordinary people. His essays introducing that
collection were developed for seminars in Advanced Feature Reporting and Writing that he taught to reporters and editors at The Washington Post.

Over the years, Harrington has written benchmark profiles of
George Bush, Jesse Jackson, Jerry Falwell, Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, Carl Bernstein and former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, as well as many indepth articles on ordinary men and women. The articles and many others are included in his books.

He is the winner of twenty local, state and national journalism awards, including the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award for an article that resulted in the return of a kidnapped infant, two National Association of Black Journalists writing awards, Northwestern University’s John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Journalism, three national Sunday magazine writing awards and the Lowell Mellett Award for improving journalism through critical evaluation. Editors at The Washington Post nominated Harrington’s work three times for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.

Harrington holds master’s degrees in journalism and sociology from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Currently the journalism department head and a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he speaks regularly to professional journalist groups and in newsrooms on the reporting and writing techniques of literary journalism. In recent years, he has given numerous presentations on in-depth writing about ordinary people, including seminars at The Washington Post, People, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Virginian-Pilot, Anchorage Daily News, Detroit Free Press, Charlotte Observer, Dagens Nyheter in Stockholm, Sweden, the American Press Institute in Washington, D.C., and the annual Poynter Institute/National Writers’ Workshops

Harrington is married with two grown children.