Jim Dwyer, reporter, columnist, and author, joined the metropolitan staff of The New York Times in May 2001 as a general assignment reporter and occasional magazine contributor. A native New Yorker and Pulitzer Prize-winner, Mr. Dwyer has covered and uncovered stories large and small, from the use of sweatshop workers in Manhattan by the Kathie Lee Gifford clothing line, to the secret amateur diplomacy behind the Irish peace process. At The Times, Mr. Dwyer has reported on such topics as the development of expensive housing along one of the most polluted sites in the Northeast; a retired detective who sent innocent people to prison and now is helping to free the wrongly convicted; the poet Seamus Heaney; and the visitors to a Vermeer exhibit who had been drawn there by the voice of an imaginary 16 year old maid in the novel, Girl With A Pearl Earring.

His contributions to The Times' coverage of the attacks on the World Trade Center have been selected by the American Society of Newspaper Editors to be included in ``Best Newspaper Writing 2002.''

Before coming to The Times, Mr. Dwyer was a columnist for 15 years with New York Newsday and the New York Daily News, where his topics ran from national politics to the life of Tito Puente, from the human genome project to a beauty parlor for pit bulls operated by two young men on a Bronx sidewalk. His investigation of a murder conviction helped free two innocent men in May 2001. His reporting on a shooting along the New Jersey Turnpike in 1998 first raised the issue of racial profiling in that incident.

Mr. Dwyer began his work in newspapers at the Hudson Dispatch in Union City, NJ in 1980. He also worked at the Elizabeth Daily Journal and The Record of Hackensack. He joined New York Newsday in 1984 and the Daily News in 1995. Among his honors, he and his Newsday colleagues shared the Pulitzer Prize for Metropolitan Reporting in 1992 for coverage of a subway crash. Mr. Dwyer won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 1995.

Mr. Dwyer is the author or co-author of three acclaimed works of non-fiction: ACTUAL INNOCENCE: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted (Doubleday, February 2000, and NAL March 2001, with Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck); TWO SECONDS UNDER THE WORLD, an account of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (Crown, 1994, with David Kocieniewski, Dee Murphy and Peg Tyre), and SUBWAY LIVES (Crown, 1991). He also contributed to THE SUBWAY SERIES READER (Simon and Schuster, 2000) and BEST NEWSPAPER WRITING 1990 (Poynter Institute.)

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Last updated April 16, 2002