An award-winning journalist for the Los Angeles Times and Dallas Morning News, now a professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Iowa, Stephen G. Bloom is the author of seven bestselling narrative nonfiction books of untold history. His latest is The Brazil Chronicles (University of Missouri Press), the history of an eclectic English-language expat newspaper in Rio de Janeiro that dates back to 1879. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes: A Cautionary Tale of Race and Brutality (University of California Press, 2021) is the story of the Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Experiment, using eye color to simulate racism. The Audacity of Inez Burns: Dreams, Desire, Treachery & Ruin in the City of Gold (Regan Arts, 2018) is a biography of a San Francisco libertine who performed fifty thousand hygienic, albeit illegal, abortions from 1906-1959. Bloom’s narrative work is exemplified by three other of his bestselling books, Postville (Harcourt, 2000), The Oxford Project (Welcome Books, 2008), and Tears of Mermaids (St. Martin’s, 2009). Postville details an escalating civil war between ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews and Lutherans in a rural Iowa meatpacking community. The Oxford Project tells the intimate stories of 100 residents in a small town over a 23-year period. Tears of Mermaids traces a single pearl from diver’s hand to woman’s neck. Bloom’s articles have appeared in Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian Chicago Tribune Magazine, Washington Post, and the London Guardian. In 2011, the city of Iowa City, one of 53 UNESCO Cities of Literature, selected Bloom for inclusion in its Literary Walk, a series of streets of commemorative plaques that honor writers with Iowa connections, including Flannery O’Conner, Kurt Vonnegut, W.P. Kinsella, Jane Smiley, Marvin Bell, and John Irving. In 2020, Bloom was chosen by the Society of Professional Journalists as the American university journalism professor of the year.