Biography
David Black is an acclaimed journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and producer. His novel Like Father was recognized as a notable book of the year by the New York Times and included among the seven best novels of the year by the Washington Post. The King of Fifth Avenue earned notable book of the year honors from the New York Times, New York Magazine, and the Associated Press.
Black received three Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations from the Mystery Writers of America: for best fact crime book for Murder at the Met, and for two Law & Order episodes, "Happily Ever After" and "Carrier."
He won the Writers Guild of America Award for The Confession and was also nominated for the same award for an episode of Hill Street Blues. The American Bar Association awarded him a Certificate of Merit for "Nullification," a provocative Law & Order episode tackling militia groups, praised by the Los Angeles Times as part of "the new Golden Age of television."
His accolades include a National Endowment for the Arts fiction grant, Playboy’s Best Article of the Year Award, an Honorable Mention for Best Essays of the Year 1986, a Special Mention in Forward’s Book of the Year, and an Atlantic Monthly "First" fiction award. He was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for The Plague Years, a book based on his two-part Rolling Stone series that won both a National Magazine Award for Reporting and the National Science Writers Award.
Black’s investigative reporting has involved considerable personal risk, including house arrest by Baby Doc’s secret police in Haiti, infiltrating totalitarian therapy cults, being stranded on a desert island, and uncovering a white slave ring in the East Village.
His television credits as producer and writer include Sidney Lumet’s 100 Centre Street—named one of the top 10 shows of the year—The Education of Max Bickford starring Richard Dreyfuss, Monk, CSI: Miami, Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, and Law & Order, which garnered Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. 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 starring Eli Wallach and Martin Landau, won the Writers Foundation of America Gold Medal for Excellence in Writing and earned Martin Landau an ACE Award for Best Actor.
The feature film The Confession, starring Alec Baldwin, Ben Kingsley, and Amy Irving, received acclaim from John Leonard in New York and The Hollywood Reporter, and was described by Metroland as "an almost miraculous act of storytelling."
Black has authored nine books and over 150 articles in publications such as The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone. His latest novel, An Impossible Life, has been praised by Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, Erica Jong, Bruce Jay Friedman, and Leslie Epstein, who called it the finest writing on Jewish gangsters since Isaac Babel.
Contemporary Authors characterizes him 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 University, where he serves as scholar-in-residence at Kirkland House. He is a former board member of the Mystery Writers of America and belongs to the Century Association, the Williams Club, the Columbia Club, PEN, the Explorers' Club, and the Players.
