Nonfiction Program Alumni & Advisory Board Members Celebrate Summer Successes
Alumni and leaders of the Carey Institute’s Nonfiction Program, which has hosted more than 30 fellows in residency since its inaugural class arrived in October 2015, have spent the summer months chalking up award nominations, finishing book projects and appearing in local and national media.
Nonfiction advisory board member Raney Aronson has finished her first year as executive producer of the PBS documentary series Frontline with an astounding 18 Emmy Award nominations for documentaries that she shepherded into existence. One film, “Outbreak,” nominated for Outstanding Investigative Journalism, is based on the reporting of the Ebola crisis by another advisory board member, Sheri Fink. And the Nonfiction Program’s new director, Tom Jennings, has been nominated for Outstanding Informational Program for his film “Being Mortal,” based on a Frontline collaboration with writer and surgeon Atul Gawande.
Recent fellows of the program are, as well, now moving forward with finished manuscripts and announcements of publication.
Washington DC-based writer Jefferson Morley tells us that the book he worked on at Carey, “The Counterspy: James Jesus Angleton, Ghost of the CIA,” will be published in Spring 2017 by St. Martin’s press. Biography and espionage thriller, the book on the legendary CIA counterspy in part stems from a simple query that Jeff succinctly laid out recently in an article for The Intercept: “Was the man utterly brilliant? Or completely nuts?”
Alum Matt Young, meanwhile, has signed a contract with Bloomsbury to publish his memoir, “Eat the Apple,” about his experience during two deployments in Iraq. Described as highlighting the tragicomic absurdism of war in the 21st century, Matt’s story starts when he is 18, enlisting in the Marines after a night of drunken revelry. It explores the inner sanctums of the field soldier in war and what drives people to sacrifice and fight.
Rome-based journalist and filmmaker Stefano Liberti’s book, “The Lords of Food”, which he wrote in part at Carey, is slated for publication by the Italian publisher Minimum Fax. It is part of his ongoing investigation of the manufacturing and distribution chains for commodities that lie at the heart of the international food industry.
Program participants have also been appearing in media outlets across the country. Photojournalist and Nonfiction Program alum Finbarr O’Reilly published a photo-essay in the New York Times blog, Lens. Daniel Ellsberg, who joined us at Carey during this past spring, appeared on WAMC for a discussion with host Alan Chartalk. And the Nonfiction Program’s vice chair, Josh Friedman, was quoted extensively in a recent article in Editor & Publisher analyzing the cost of losing major outlets for long-form journalism over the past decade. “What we’re doing at the Carey Institute is to fill the void as much as possible, in hopes that someone will come along with an economic model that in the long run will solve this problem,” Friedman said. “But in the short run, if you don’t have long-form journalism, you don’t have a democracy.”
The Carey Institute Nonfiction Program will be welcoming its next class of fellows in October 2016 and is now accepting applications for Spring 2017.