Earl Swift

Earl Swift has written for a living since his teens. Now 57, the Virginia-based journalist has been a Fulbright fellow, PEN finalist and six-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, and has earned a reputation for powerful narrative and scrupulous reporting. Swift wrote for newspapers in St. Louis, Anchorage and, for twenty-two years, in Norfolk, where his long-form features won numerous state and national awards. His stories have also appeared in Outside, PARADE, Popular Mechanics, The Atlantic Cities, America's Best Newspaper Writing, Our State, and River Teeth. He is the author of AUTO BIOGRAPHY: A Classic Car, An Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream (HarperCollins, 2014), a narrative journey through postwar America told through a single old car and the fourteen people who've owned it; THE BIG ROADS (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), an armchair history of the interstate highway system and its effects, physical and cultural, on the nation it binds; JOURNEY ON THE JAMES (University of Virginia Press, 2001), the story of a great American river and the largely untold history that has unfolded in and around it; WHERE THEY LAY: Searching for America's Lost Soldiers (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), for which he accompanied an Army archaeological team into the jungles of Laos in search of a helicopter crew shot down thirty years before; and a 2007 collection of his stories, THE TANGIERMAN'S LAMENT (UVa Press).An avid outdoorsman, Swift has through-hiked the Appalachian Trail, circumnavigated the Chesapeake Bay by sea kayak, and canoed the 435-mile James River from source to sea.Since 2012 he's been a residential fellow of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities at the University of Virginia. He lives with his 22-year-old daughter, Saylor, in Crozet, Virginia, and is engaged to the fetching Amy Walton of Virginia Beach.