I've spent the past seven years teaching in the English Dept. at CWRU as the university's only journalism professor. Before teaching, I spent 20+ years as a newspaper reporter in Colorado, where I won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for "Final Salute," a 12,000 word story about spending nearly a year with U.S. Marine casualty affairs officers and the families they touched. I expanded the work into a book, "Final Salute," which was a finalist for the National Book Award. My previous book, "Obit," is a collection of narrative obituaries about people who usually don't get obituaries.