Colin Woodard

About

Colin Woodard is Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. He was most recently State & National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, where he won a George Polk Award in 2013 for his investigative reporting and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He is also a Contributing Editor at Politico Magazine. A longtime foreign correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, The Chronicle of Higher Education and The San Francisco Chronicle, he has reported from more than fifty foreign countries and seven continents, and spent four years in Eastern Europe during and after the collapse of communism. He is the New York Times bestselling author of six books including American Nations: A History of The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (Viking Press, 2011), Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood (Viking, June 2020) and the New York Times bestseller The Republic of Pirates (Harcourt, 2007), on which the NBC drama “Crossbones” is based. He is a past recipient of the Jane Bagley Lehman Award for Public Advocacy (for his global environmental reporting) and the Maine Literary Award for Non-Fiction (for American Nations). He was a 2013 and 2014 Gerald Loeb Award finalist, and in 2014 was named one of the “America’s Best State Capitol Reporters” by the Washington Post and "Journalist of the Year" by the Maine Press Association. A Maine native, he is a graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago, a former Pew Fellow in International Journalism at Johns Hopkins-SAIS, and a current Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London.