Miles Corwin

Miles Corwin is a Los Angeles-based, prize-winning author and journalist.https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/corwin-miles His books have been lauded by The New York Times, The Washington Post, New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Le Monde (France), among other publications.
Corwin is a recipient of the PEN Center USA Award for Creative Nonfiction. He is a professor in the Literary Journalism Program in the English Department at the University of California, Irvine.https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5495https://www.newuniversity.org/2011/02/15/miles-corwin-veteran-journalist/
== Career ==
Corwin has worked as a reporter for the South Bay Daily Breeze, the St. Louis Globe -Democrat, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Los Angeles Times, where he specialized in covering crime. While at the Los Angeles Times, Corwin shared Pulitzer staff prizes in 1993 and 1995https://www.latimes.com/about/story/los-angeles-times-pulitzer-prizes
Corwin is the author of three nonfiction books and three novels. 
For The Killing Season (1997), a national bestseller, Corwin spent seven months in South-Central Los Angeles with homicide detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department to document the lives of officers, killers, victims, and their families. The New York Times described the book as “moral, humane, and ultimately uplifting.”https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/27/books/a-very-bad-year.html The New Yorker called it “compelling.”The New Yorker, September 15, 1995
In And Still We Rise (2000)https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/2000/04/09/schools-for-hope/c3ff2f72-8557-4c90-a377-175d42ef34e0/ Corwin spent a year with academically gifted seniors at Crenshaw High School, also in South-Central. The book won the PEN Center USA Award for Creative Nonfictionhttps://www.librarything.com/author/corwinmiles and was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. The San Francisco Chronicle called it “an impressive, important work of narrative journalism . . . A more gifted reporter can barely be imagined.”https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Rise-Finds-Education-Is-Rife-With-Inequity-2751779.php A review in Newsday described the book as “compelling and beautifully constructed . . . In And Still We Rise all the complexities of a carefully chronicled reality coalesce into art.”Newsday, June 11, 2000
Corwin’s Homicide Special (2004) documents six complex police investigations, including the murders of actor Robert Blake’s second wife and of a friend of Robert Durst, a real estate heir. Kirkus Reviews described the book as “a literate, unfailingly interesting work of true crime.”https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/miles-corwin/homicide-special/
His novels Kind of Blue (2010)https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-miles-corwin-20101128-story.html and Midnight Alley (2012)https://www.ocregister.com/2012/05/30/uci-professor-explores-la-crime-in-novel/ feature homicide detective Ash Levine of the LAPD’s Felony Special Unit. Levine is a former Israel Defense Forces paratrooper. Publisher’s Weekly called Kind of Blue“a grittily realistic story of murder…and redemption…(a) strong debut.”https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-60809-007-5 The book Read Me, Los Angeles listed Kind of Blue as one of “The Essential Crime Novels of L.A."https://crimereads.com/the-essential-crime-novels-of-los-angeles/ Booklist advised readers of Midnight Alley to: “recommend this superb novel to fans of crime thrillers and police procedurals…The bonus is that tingle in the spine that comes when one turns the last page.”https://www.amazon.com/Midnight-Alley-Ash-Levine-Thriller/dp/1608091155
In 2015 Corwin published L.A. Nocturne, in which Detective Jacob Silver tries to solve a 1946 murder. Le Monde wrote that it was “dense, precise . . . and remarkably well-designed . . . L.A. Nocturne offers everything we love in an American crime thriller—blood, sweat, and tears.”
A column that Corwin wrote for the Los Angeles Times served as the basis for President Barack Obama’s speech at his signing of the repeal of the U.S. military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The column told the story of the rescue of Corwin’s father, Lloyd, by a gay soldier during World War II’s Battle of the Bulge. The Obama administration invited Corwin to the ceremony, where the president acknowledged him to the audience.https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-dec-23-la-na-dont-ask-20101223-story.html
== Personal life ==
Corwin is a native of Los Angeles. He spent his early years living with his family at the edge of the city’s Skid Row in a hotel owned by his grandfather.
When Corwin attended Santa Monica College, he was a member of the Junior College All-American Swim Teamhttps://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/downloads/00000109p. He received an undergraduate degree in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was a member of the swimming and water polo teams. He worked for more than five years as a Los Angeles County beach lifeguard.
Corwin received a master’s degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism.https://journalism.missouri.edu/alum/miles-corwin/ He lives in Altadena, California, with his family.
Category:Writers from Los Angeles
Category:American journalists