Colin Woodard
American Nations by Maine author and journalist Colin Woodard

Colin Woodard

Colin Woodard is an award-winning journalist and the author of American Nations: A History of The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (Viking, 2011), The Republic of Pirates: Being The True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (Harcourt, 2007), The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier (Viking, 2004), and Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas (Basic Books, 2000).

American Nations was named a Best Book of 2011 by the editors of both The New Republic and The Globalist, and received the 2012 Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction. The Lobster Coast is a New England bestseller and Booksense Notable Title. Republic of Pirates is the basis the NBC drama Crossbones, airing in early 2014 and starring John Malkovich. Woodard was named Best Portland Author in 2009 and 2012 by the readers of the Portland Phoenix and Maine magazine's list of Fifty Making a Difference in Maine.

Woodard is currently State & National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram and received a 2012 George Polk Award for an investigative project he did for those papers. He also received the 2004 Jane Bagley Lehman Award for Public Advocacy (for his global environmental reporting), a Pew Fellowship in International Journalism at the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Study, and was a finalist for a 2013 Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. A longtime foreign correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, he has reported from more than fifty foreign countries and six continents, including postings in Budapest, Zagreb, Washington, D.C., and the United States–Mexico border. His work has appeared in dozens of publications, including The Economist, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, Bloomberg View, and Down East.

Woodard is a graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago, where he was awarded the 1997 Morton Kaplan prize for his master's thesis on the causes of ethnic conflict in the Balkans. Born in Waterville and raised in western Maine, he now lives in the Midcoast with his wife, Sarah Skillin Woodard, and their son.