Stephen Bloom

Stephen G. Bloom is an American journalist and professor of Journalism at the University of Iowa. Bloom attended the University of California, Berkeley, and received a B.A. in 1973. His current work focuses on long-form nonfiction, oral history, and online narrative journalism. He teaches magazine reporting and writing, and media ethics in a digital age. Bloom is currently writing a biography of Jane Elliott, the Riceville, Iowa, third-grade schoolteacher who in 1968 devised what would become internationally known as the Blue-Eyes, Brown-Eyes Exercise, which alerted white students to the devastating personal impact of racism. Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2020. Bloom’s latest book, The Audacity of Inez Burns: Dreams, Desire, Treachery & Ruin in the City of Gold (Regan Arts), is the story a San Francisco abortionist who performed 50,000 illegal abortions from 1910—1951. Bloom and photographer Peter Feldstein are the co-authors of The Oxford Project (Welcome Books, 2010). The large-format book takes an unflinching look at life in a small Iowa town. Reviews and stories have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Smithsonian, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Sunday Morning, CNN.com, National Public Radio, Harvard University's Nieman Reports, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, and the Minneapolis Post. The Oxford Project won the Alex Award from the American Library Association. Bloom is the author of Tears of Mermaids: The Secret Story of Pearls (St. Martin's Press, 2009), a nonfiction detective story that tracks the cultural, economic and political saga of the world’s oldest gem. Bloom has been named Iowa Author of the Year, and has held fellowships at MacDowell and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Society and Medicine. He was the Robert Laxalt Distinguished Writer at the Reynolds School of Journalism, University of Nevada, Reno, as well as the Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. Bloom is co-founder (with Professor Hanno Hardt) of the Iowa Journalists Oral History Project, the first online chronicle of the contributions of Iowa’s senior journalists.