PERSON: Charlie Pierce

Self-employed

Writer

He has been a writer-at-large for a men’s fashion magazine, and his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the LA Times Magazine, the Nation, the Atlantic, Sports Illustrated and The Chicago Tribune, among others. Although he is no longer a contributor to Eric Alterman’s Altercation, he remains a devoted reader. Pierce is a not infrequent contributor to the American Prospect and Slate. He appears weekly on National Public Radio’s sports program Only A Game and on the Stephanie Miller Show and is a regular panelist on NPR’s game show, Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me. Since July 1997 he has been a writer at large at Esquire, covering everything from John McCain to the Hubble telescope, with more than a few shooting stars thrown in between. In the fall of 2011 Pierce left the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, where he had been since 2002, to become a staff writer for Grantland as well as the lead writer for esquire.com’s politics blog.<br> <br> Charles Pierce is the recipient of numerous professional awards and honors. On several occasions, he was named a finalist for the Associated Press Sports Editor’s award for best column writing, and it has been suggested that if only he would wear a tie, they might have let him win. He was a 1996 National Magazine Award finalist for his piece on Alzheimer’s disease “In the Country of My Disease,” and has expanded the piece into a book Hard to Forget: An Alzheimer’s Story for Random House. In 2004, he won a National Headliners Award for his Globe Magazine piece, “Deconstructing Ted,” and in 2010 another of this Globe Magazine pieces, The Long, Strange, Twisting Case of Frances Carriere’s Murder, won a Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence in Journalism. Depending on which year this is, Pierce has appeared in Best American Sportswriting more times than any other writer, or has tied with Roger Angell for most appearances in Best American Sportswriting, or is sulking in second place and plotting to regain the top spot soon, or is throwing himself into a stein of despair and refusing to talk about it ever again (the fact that David Halberstam didn’t live to see just exactly how wrong he was about Pierce’s Tiger Woods profile, “The Man. Amen.” doesn’t help very much, either. Mark 6:4). Nonetheless,Pierce’s sportswriting has been anthologized in Sports Guy: In Search of Corkball, Warroad Hockey, Hooters Golf, Tiger Woods, and the Big, Big Game. Pierce is justly proud of the many awards and accolades he has received from the Media Research Center, and the reassurance they provide that he won’t be running out of things to write about anytime soon (but what’s with giving his dinner invite to Sam Donaldson?) He was awarded third place in the PBWAA Dan S. Blumenthal Memorial Writing Contest. When he won Phone Jeopardy, Alex Trebek sent him a plaque.<br> <br> Charles Pierce lives in metro Boston with at least some of his three children all of the time, a malfunctioning Toro lawnmower, a somewhat more reliable snowblower, and his extremely long-suffering wife, who stockpiles shear pins like Mitt Romney stockpiles dried corn.