Dave Marcus has had an eclectic career that has taken him from dodging mortar fire in Africa to teaching Huckleberry Finn in a classroom in rural Massachusetts. Marcus shared a Pulitzer Prize, spent a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and worked as a high school teacher before publishing a book about American teenagers.

In two decades as a staff member of the Boston Globe, the Dallas Morning News, and the Miami Herald, Marcus was a columnist, roving national reporter, and foreign correspondent. He covered the breakup of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military invasion of Panama, the Gulf War, the return of Hong Kong to China, and civil wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola, and Soviet Georgia. Returning to domestic affairs, he covered education for U.S. News & World Report.

His freelance articles have appeared in Vanity Fair, GQ, and the New York Times. He has been a guest on NPR’s Morning Edition and Televisa’s Spanish-language show Contrapunto (Counterpoint). For his work on a series about violence against women around the world, Marcus shared the top honor in journalism, the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Earlier, he was part of a team of finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism, for a series called “Hidden Wars.”

Marcus spent four years researching his book, which tells the story of a group of teenagers who were sent to a therapeutic program in the foothills of the Berkshires. Houghton Mifflin has just published the nonfiction narrative, What It Takes to Pull Me Through: Why Teenagers Get in Trouble and How Four of Them Got Out.  

While a student at Brown University, he was elected president of the senior class and graduated with honors. He then studied Latin American literature at the University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia. Later, as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, he studied urban planning and immigration. He has been a writer in residence at the Tuck School of Dartmouth College, a visiting lecturer at the University of Houston, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the University of Redlands in California, and a visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts.

Unlike most education reporters, Marcus has worked as a teacher. He spent last year as a visiting fellow at Deerfield Academy, where he taught American literature and writing courses. Now a contributing editor to U.S. News, he is also a visiting scholar at Ithaca College’s Park School of Communications. Marcus travels the country speaking to middle schools, high schools and conferences. See www.DaveMarcus.com