Colin Woodard is an award-winning author and journalist. He is currently State and National Affairs Writer for the Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram, where he was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist and received a 2012 George Polk Award for his investigative reporting. He is also a contributing editor at Politico and reviews books for the Washington Post. A native of Maine, he has reported from more than fifty foreign countries and seven continents, and lived for more than four years in Eastern Europe. In 2014 he was named one of the "Best State Capitol Reporters in America" by the Washington Post and Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press Association.He is the author of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (Viking, 2011) which was named one of the Best Books of 2011 by the editors of The New Republic and The Globalist and won the 2012 Maine Literary Award for Non-Fiction. His forthcoming book is Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood (Viking, June 2020.)His other books include the New England bestseller The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier (Viking Press, 2004), a cultural and environmental history of coastal Maine; Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas (Basic Books, 2000), a narrative non-fiction account of the deterioration of the world's oceans; and the New York Times Bestseller The Republic of Pirates: Being The True And Surprising Story Of The Caribbean Pirates And The Man Who Brought Them Down , on which the NBC series "Crossbones" (starring John Malkovich) is based.His fifth book, American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good (Viking, 2016) was a finalist for the 2017 Chautauqua Prize and won the 2017 Maine Literary Award for Non-fiction.He lives in midcoast Maine. Show less «