David Black is an award-winning journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and
producer. His novel Like Father was named a notable book of the year by
the New York Times and listed as one of the seven best novels of the
year by the Washington Post. The King of Fifth Avenue was named a
notable book of the year by the New York Times, New York Magazine, and
the A.P.
Mr. Black received the Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination from the
Mystery Writers of America for best fact crime book for Murder at the
Met. His second Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination was for "Happily Ever
After," an episode of Law & Order. His third Edgar Allan Poe Award
nomination was for "Carrier," also an episode of Law & Order.
He won the Writers' Guild of America Award for The Confession. He was
also nominated for the Writers' Guild of America Award for an episode
of Hill Street Blues. He received an American Bar Association
Certificate of Merit for "Nullification," a controversial episode of
Law & Order about Militia groups, which the Los Angeles Times called an
example of "the new Golden Age of television."
Among his other awards, he has received a National Endowment of the
Arts grant in fiction, Playboy's Best Article of the Year Award, Best
Essays of the Year1986 Honorable Mention, Forward's Book of the Year
Special Mention, and an Atlantic Monthly "First" award for fiction. He
has also received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for The Plague Years, a
book based on a two-part series that he wrote for Rolling Stone and
that won a National Magazine Award in Reporting and the National
Science Writers Award.
Researching articles, David Black has risked his life a number of
times, including being put under house arrest by Baby Doc's secret
police in Haiti, infiltrating totalitarian therapy cults, being
abandoned on a desert island, and exposing a white slave organization
in the East Village.
Among the television shows he has produced and written are the Sidney
Lumet series 100 Centre Street, which was listed as one of the 10 best
shows of the year, the Richard Dreyfuss series The Education of Max
Bickford, Monk, CSI-Miami, Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, and Law &
Order, which received an Emmy nomination for Best Dramatic Show and a
Golden Globe nomination. He has also been nominated for the PGA Golden
Laurel Award.
His TV movie, Legacy of Lies, a drama about three generations of Jewish
gangsters and cops in Chicago, which starred Eli Wallach and Martin
Landau, won the Writers Foundation of America Gold Medal for Excellence
in Writing. It also received an ACE Award for Martin Landau for Best
Actor.
His feature, The Confession, starring Alec Baldwin, Ben Kingsley, and
Amy Irving was praised in New York by John Leonard and in The Hollywood
Reporter, among other places, and was described in Metroland as "an
almost miraculous act of storytelling."
He has published nine books and over 150 articles in magazines,
including The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and
Rolling Stone. His new novel, An Impossible Life, has been praised by,
among others, Nobel Prize winning author Czeslaw Milosz, Erica Jong,
Bruce Jay Friedman, and Leslie Epstein, who called it the best writing
about Jewish gangsters since Isaac Babel.
Contemporary Authors describes Black as "a versatile, multi-media
writer who has distinguished himself in both fiction and non-fiction."
He has taught writing at Lehman College, Mt. Holyoke College, and
Harvard, where he is a scholar-in-residence at Kirkland House. He is
also a former board member of the Mystery Writers of America and a
member of the Century Association, the Williams Club, the Columbia
Club, PEN, the Explorers' Club, and the Players.
