Biography

In a career spanning 35 years, Leonard Pitts, Jr. has been a columnist, a college professor, a radio producer and a lecturer. But if you ask him to define himself, he will invariably choose one word.

He is a writer, period.

He knew this from an early age; when he was five, he began penning superhero stories starring a boy hero with a cape, super strength and the ability to fly, who bore a not-quite coincidental resemblance to the author himself. Pitts began sending his stories and poems out to magazines when he was 12. The magazines, quite sensibly, sent them back.

Two years later, The Los Angeles Sentinel, a newspaper serving the African-American community, finally made him a published writer when it printed a poem he had written. Four years after that, SOUL magazine, a national black entertainment tabloid, finally made him a professional writer when it brought him on as a freelancer. Pitts juggled interviews with Gladys Knight and the Temptations with class work as an 18-year-old student at the University of Southern California.

Pitts was graduated by USC at 19 with a degree in English having entered school at 15 under an honors program, and went to work full time for SOUL, eventually becoming its editor.

In the years since then, Pitts' work has appeared in such publications as Musician, Spin, TV Guide, Reader's Digest and Parenting. In addition, he wrote, produced and syndicated Who We Are, an award-winning 1988 radio documentary on the history of Black America. He has written and produced numerous other radio programs on subjects as diverse as Madonna and Martin Luther King, Jr. Pitts was also a writer for radio's popular countdown program, Casey's Top 40 with Casey Kasem.

In 1991, he joined The Miami Herald in 1991 as its pop music critic. Since 1994, he has penned a syndicated column of commentary on pop culture, social issues and family life. His book, Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood, was released in May, 1999 and was reissued in paperback in June of 2006. His critically-acclaimed first novel, Before I Forget, was released in 2009 and a collection of his columns, Forward From This Moment, was published that same year.

In 2004, Pitts was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1992. In 1997, Pitts took first place for commentary in division four (newspapers with a circulation of over 300,000) in the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors' Ninth Annual Writing Awards competition. He is a three-time recipient of the National Association of Black Journalists’ Award of Excellence, a five-time recipient of the Atlantic City Press Club’s National Headliners Award and a seven-time recipient of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Green Eyeshade Award. In 2001, he received the American Society of Newspaper Editors prestigious ASNE Award For Commentary Writing and was named Feature of the Year - Columnist by Editor and Publisher magazine. In 2002, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists awarded Pitts its inaugural Columnist of the Year award. In 2002 and in 2009, GLAAD Media awarded Pitts the Outstanding Newspaper Columnist award. In 2008, he received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Old Dominion University.


In 2003 and 2004, Pitts was a visiting professor teaching journalism at Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia. In 2005-2006 he was a journalism professor at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio and at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. In 2006-2007, he taught at the University of Maryland. Twice each week, millions of newspaper readers around the country seek out his rich and uncommonly resonant voice. In a word, he connects with them. Nowhere was this demonstrated more forcefully than in the response to his initial column on the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Pitts' column, "We'll Go Forward From This Moment," an angry and defiant open letter to the terrorists, circulated the globe via the Internet. It generated upwards of 30,000 emails, and has since been set to music, reprinted in poster form, read on television by Regis Philbin and quoted by Congressman Richard Gephardt as part of the Democratic Party's weekly radio address.

Leonard Pitts was born and raised in Southern California. Since 1995, he has lived in Bowie, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D. C. with his wife and family.