Dan Barry

Dan Barry is a longtime reporter and columnist for The New York Times. The author of several books, he writes on myriad topics, including sports, culture, New York City, and the nation.

Since joining The Times in September 1995, Barry has covered many major events, including the World Trade Center catastrophe, Hurricane Katrina, and the coronavirus epidemic. His honors include the 2003 American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for deadline reporting, for his coverage of the first anniversary of Sept. 11; the 2005 Mike Berger Award, from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; the 2015 Best American Newspaper Narrative Award; the 2019 American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for feature writing; three Emmys for documentaries produced by The Times; the Eugene O'Neill Award; and the inaugural Pete Hamill Award for Journalistic Excellence, in 2021. He has also been nominated as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice: once in 2006 for his slice-of-life reports from hurricane-battered New Orleans and from New York, and again in 2010 for his coverage of the Great Recession and its effects on the lives and relationships of America.

He previously worked at The Providence Journal, where, as a member of its investigative team, he shared a George Polk Award in 1992, for a series on the causes of a state banking crisis, and a Pulitzer Prize in 1994,for an investigation into Rhode Island’s court system that led to various reforms and the criminal indictment of the chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court.

Barry has also written This Land: America, Lost and Found, a collection of his “This Land” columns; The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland; Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game, which received the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing; City Lights, a collection of his “About New York” columns; and Pull Me Up: A Memoir, published in 2004. He has also edited a Library of America volume dedicated to the journalism of Jimmy Breslin, and his writings have appeared in several anthologies.

Born in 1958 in Jackson Heights, Queens, he was the first child of Eugene Barry, of Brooklyn, and Noreen (Minogue) Barry, of County Galway, Ireland. He grew up in Deer Park, on Long Island, attended St. Bonaventure University and New York University, and worked as a ditch digger and delicatessen clerk before landing his first newspaper job, at the Journal Inquirer of Manchester, Conn., in 1983. He and his wife, Mary Trinity, live in Maplewood, N.J., where they raised two daughters, Nora and Grace.