Stephen G. Bloom

A former award-winning journalist for the Los Angeles Times and Dallas Morning News, now Professor of Journalism at the University of Iowa, Stephen G. Bloom is the author of six nonfiction narrative books. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality (University of California Press, 2021) is the story of the Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment, using eye color to simulate racism. The Audacity of Inez Burns: Dreams, Desire, Treachery & Ruin in the City of Gold (Regan Arts, 2018) is a biography of a San Francisco libertine who performed fifty thousand hygienic, albeit illegal, abortions. Bloom’s narrative work is exemplified by three other of his bestselling books, Postville (Harcourt, 2000), The Oxford Project (Welcome Books, 2008), and Tears of Mermaids (St. Martin’s). Postville details an escalating civil war between ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews and Lutherans in a rural meatpacking community. The Oxford Project tells the intimate stories of 100 residents in a small town over a 23-year period. Tears of Mermaids traces a single pearl from diver’s hand to woman’s jewelry. Bloom’s articles have appeared in Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine, Chicago Tribune Magazine, Washington Post, London Guardian, CJR, Salon, Zócala Public Square, and Narratively. In 2011, the city of Iowa City, one of 39 UNESCO Cities of Literature, selected Bloom for inclusion in its Literary Walk, a series of streets of commemorative plaques that honor writers with Iowa connections, including Flannery O’Conner, Kurt Vonnegut, W.P. Kinsella, Jane Smiley, Marvin Bell, and John Irving. Bloom is the 2020 winner of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Distinguished Teaching in Journalism Award, conferred annually to one journalism professor, “who has made an exceptional contribution to the profession and/or journalism education.”