Chris Colin

Alum 2008, Alum 2010, Alum 2021

Chris Colin has written about problematic billionaires, blind visual artists, solitary confinement, river access wars, Japan’s rent-a-friend industry, Obama’s Irish roots, the evolving sphere of long-term worry, endangered noodles, chimp filmmakers, insurgent Barbadian road tennis, a gay chorus’s tour of the Deep South and more for the NewYorker.com, the New York Times Magazine, Pop-Up Magazine, Saveur, the Atavist, Outside, Wired, Smithsonian and Mother Jones.

His work is featured in 2019’s Best American Science & Nature Writing, and has won the Society of Professional Journalists Award for Features & Long-form Storytelling and two Lowell Thomas awards. He is also a contributing writer for California Sunday Magazine and Afar. His latest book, Off, will come out in March 2021. About it Dave Eggers said, “For humanity to stay sane, this must be read like the Bible.”

Chris is also the author of What to Talk About, with Rob Baedeker, as well as What Really Happened to the Class of ’93 and Blindsight, named one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2011. In 2015 he co-wrote This Is Camino, which was nominated for a James Beard Award. He publishes Six Feet of Separation, a free pandemic publication by and for kids — “a virtual newspaper for our troubled times,” Dan Rather called it. He attended Vassar College, and lives in San Francisco with his two children and wife, Amy Standen, a public radio and podcast producer.