Mark Patinkin

Mark Patinkin, 52, has been writing a thrice-weekly column for the Providence Journal for 25 years, syndicated nationally by the Scripps-Howard News Wire. In 1989, he co-authored The Silent War (Random House), a Book-of-the-Month Club Alternate Selection about the world’s most competitive companies. That same year, Mark covered the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, and was arrested for trying to interview a dissident in Romania. In 1985, he spent a month in Africa writing about famine, later publishing AN AFRICAN JOURNEY (Eerdmans). In 1986, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in international reporting for a newspaper series on religious violence in Belfast, India and Beirut. Mark later did a series on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Mark also spent several years, part-time, doing a television talk show and "video columns" for local network affiliates, receiving three New England Emmy awards. He has published a collection of columns and two local humor books, one of which, THE RHODE ISLAND DICTIONARY (QuahogMaid Books), is considered Rhode Island's all-time best-selling book. Mark has published a "My turn" column in NEWSWEEK and several articles in READER'S DIGEST, including excerpts from his current book, UP AND RUNNING, an inspirational story of a boy triumphing over illness and loss in an astonishing way. It will be published late September 2005 by Center Street, an imprint of Time Warner Book Group, and will be a Featured Alternate of four books clubs—Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club, American Compass, and Crossings—and in 2006, a READER'S DIGEST Condensed Book.

Mark grew up in Chicago, graduated from Middlebury College and currently lives in Providence with his wife and three children.