Gary M. Pomerantz is an American journalist and New York Times best-selling author who lectures in the graduate program in journalism at Stanford University. His books include Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, a multi-generational biography of Atlanta, Georgia and its racial conscience, told through the families of Atlanta Mayors Maynard Jackson and Ivan Allen Jr., and The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End, a story about race, regret and the storied Boston Celtics’ dynasty.
He spent nearly two decades as a daily journalist. In 1981, he followed John Feinstein and Michael Wilbon as a summer intern in the sports department at The Washington Post. At the Post, he covered the Washington Redskins, Georgetown University basketball and the National Football League. In 1987-1988, he served as a Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan, studying theater and the Bible. He then moved to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution where, for the next 11 years, he wrote social and political profiles, special projects, columns and served on the newspaper's editorial board. His six nonfiction books feature a broad array of topics. Nine Minutes Twenty Seconds, about the crash of Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 7529, was also published in China, Germany and Britain. In WILT, 1962, Pomerantz describes the night when basketball star Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game against the New York Knicks in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Named an "Editors' Choice" book by The New York Times, WILT, 1962 was described by Entertainment Weekly as "a meticulous and engaging narrative – a slam dunk of a read." In 2017, author Malcolm Gladwell praised Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, telling Business Insider, "It's probably the best book I've read in quite some time. It's an incredibly cool way to think about a city. I've always been fascinated by Atlanta, and I didn't really understand the city until I read that book... It's told so beautifully through these two families. It's really a remarkable book." His book, Their Life’s Work, about the Pittsburgh Steelers' football dynasty of the 1970s, short-listed for the 2014 PEN/ESPN Award for literary sportswriting. From 1999 to 2001 Pomerantz served as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at Emory University in Atlanta. In 2007, he began lecturing at Stanford University, teaching courses on specialized reporting and writing.
