Fred
Powledge is the author of seventeen books and scores of magazine articles and
reports. His interests range from biological diversity to climate change, and
from race relations to circus life.
Powledge's
articles have appeared in dozens of publications, including The New Yorker,
Audubon, BioScience, and many others. They draw on his extensive
experience as a journalist, which includes reporting as a staff member of The New
York Times, the Atlanta Journal, and
the Associated Press. He began his journalism career at the age of
10, as the reporting staff, editor, publisher, deliverer, and sole employee of a homemade
newspaper in his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. The venture proved to be financially wanting, and Powledge declared bankruptcy.
He
has served as a consultant to agricultural research institutions in Colombia,
Peru, Sri Lanka, and Italy.
He
has contributed to biennial editions of World Resources, which is an
authority on global environmental and development issues, and to several
encyclopedias. He designed, researched, and wrote the Web site of the Bay and
Paul Foundations chronicling the foundations’ $180,000 Biodiversity Leadership
Awards to workers in the fields of biological diversity. Powledge has edited reports on a variety of
subjects, including electronic journalism, prostate cancer, environmental
science, and the economic, social, and biological future of the potato.
Most
recently, Fred Powledge has been the author of articles in the journal BioScience on a variety of important environmental
subjects—intellectual ownership of everyday genetic material such as rice and
beans; preservation of agricultural seeds; the environment after George Bush;
island biogeography; the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment; the Chesapeake Bay;
botanical gardens, and climate change.
His
books, all of them nonfiction, are about race relations (Powledge covered the
civil rights movement in the South and North for The New York Times and Atlanta
Journal), the life of a small tented circus over the course of a season; the
importance of water; the food business, and other subjects. Six of his books
are for young readers; his most recent is about the origins of medicines in the
tropical rainforest.
Powledge
lives with his science-writer wife in Tucson, Arizona.
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