WORD THURSDAYS FEATURING CHRIS CONWAY, STEVE FRIEDMAN, AND JEFF LEEN

CHRIS CONWAY

Chris Conway is an editor at New York Times Opinion and NYT Sunday Review. He is a graduate of Fordham University Law School and University of Missouri- Columbia for Journalism. He is married to Jennifer Preston and a father to twins.

STEVE FRIEDMAN

In 1984, Steve moved to St. Louis, where he wrote for and then was editor-in-chief at St. Louis Magazine until 1992. He then moved to New York City to take a job as senior editor at GQ magazine. In 1997 he transitioned to writing full-time and teaching. He lives in Manhattan.

Steve has written four books and co-authored two others, and was named a National Magazine Award finalist twice, as well as the recipient of the Nora Sayre Residency for a Nonfiction Writer at the Corporation of Yaddo, in 2019. His stories, which have been published and/or cited as “notable” in The Best American Series (Sports, Essays and Travel) 30 times, have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Esquire, GQ, Outside, New York Magazine, Runner’s World and many other publications. One of his favorites is a piece of fiction published in The Big Book of Ghost Stories, inspired by a strange and ambitious group of women and men who worked at a newspaper called the Columbia Daily Tribune in the early 1980s. It’s called The Lost Boy of the Ozarks.

JEFF LEEN

Jeff Leen oversees The Washington Post’s Investigative Unit, which he joined as a reporter in 1997. He led a team whose examination of D.C. police shootings won the 1999 Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service, the paper’s first since Watergate. He became deputy investigations editor in 1999 and took over the unit in 2003. Previously, he worked as an investigative reporter for a decade at the Miami Herald, where he co-authored a 10-part series on the Medellin Cartel that was later turned into a book with Guy Gugliotta, Kings of Cocaine (Simon & Schuster, 1989). Jeff joined the Herald as a reporter in 1982, working in the Naples, Delray Beach and West Palm Beach bureaus before becoming a general assignment reporter covering the Miami drug trade in 1985. As a reporter or an editor, he has contributed to investigations that have been honored with 10 other Pulitzer Prizes, including examinations of Hurricane Andrew’s impact on South Florida, abuse in D.C. group homes, child deaths in D.C., the Sept. 11 plot, the Jack Abramoff scandal, Dick Cheney, the Snowden documents, fatal police shootings nationwide, the Roy Moore scandal and the Jan. 6 attack. He is also the author of The Queen of the Ring: Sex, Muscles, Diamonds and the Making of an American Legend (Atlantic Monthly, 2009). He was a Stanford Fellow in 1988-1989. He has a son, Lee Shank, who is a salmon fisherman out of Kodiak Alaska. He lives with his wife, Lynn Medford, former Post Style editor and magazine editor, outside Annapolis. They have two cats, Bob, who was given to them by Carolyn White, and Elbee, who they found in a church parking lot.

Link to RSVP: Word Thursdays Featuring Chris Conway, Jeff Leen, and Steve Friedman | Facebook