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Stephen Bloom

Professor
W313 Adler Journalism & Mass Comm. Bldg. (AJB)
(319)335-3368
stephen-g-bloom@uiowa.edu

B.A., 1973, University of California at Berkeley

Stephen G. Bloom's interests include long-form narrative writing, writing for the Internet, the Brazilian press, and the oral histories of journalists.  He teaches narrative journalism and personal-experience writing. 

Prior to joining the Iowa faculty in 1993, Bloom was a staff writer at the Sacramento Bee, San Jose Mercury News, Los Angeles Times, and Dallas Morning News. He was Brazilian correspondent for the Field News Service and national news editor at the Latin America Daily Post. In 1992 Bloom served as press secretary and chief speech writer for San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan. Bloom's work has appeared in Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, Wilson Quarterly, DoubleTake, The Chronicle of Higher Education, American Journalism Review, International Herald Tribune, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Tribune Magazine, Money, Journal of Health Communication, Annals of Clinical Psychiatry, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, American Editor, The Californians, Pharos, Wapsipinicon Almanac, Quill, and National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." His essays have appeared in the electronic magazines Tweak (We All Sat Around Like Schlemiels and The French Eat Their Young), the-cake.com (Mikey's Close Call and Shop), Salon Magazine (Busy Signal, Fantasy Isle, Pack of Wolves, Facts of Life, Sex-free Bliss?, Dr. Fart Speaks, and Prozac for PMS), Oyster Boy Review (The Little Man), and on National Public Radio (Postcards from Postville).

His nonfiction book, Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America, was published by Harcourt in September 2000. The book focuses on fundamental changes confronting a small, predominately Lutheran, Iowa town after 150 Lubavitcher Jews settle there, buy the local slaughterhouse, and become the community's new power brokers. The book was chosen as a Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, as well as of Quality Paperback Books Club. Postville was named a  Best Book of the year by MS-NBC, The Chicago Sun-Times, Denver Rocky Mountain News, The Chicago Tribune, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Postville reviews. 

A collection of Bloom's articles and essays over the last 30 years was published as Inside the Writer's Mind: Writing Narrative Journalism by Iowa State Press in August, 2002.

Bloom is co-founder (with Professor Emeritus Hanno Hardt) of The Iowa Journalists Oral History Project, the first systematic project to chronicle the lives and contributions of Iowa's senior journalists.  The project records the professional histories of Iowa reporters, editors, publishers, photographers and columnists.  A version of the project is accessible on the Internet at: http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/journalists/

Last spring, Bloom led a master's writing and reporting project during which students tackled different elements of a single story - gambling in Iowa's newest and largest casino resort. Articles about the course appeared in Columbia Journalism Review and Harvard University's Nieman Reports.

He has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Society and Medicine under the aegis of the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

Currently, Bloom is working on a project with photographer Peter Feldstein, examining life in the rural community of Oxford, Iowa. In 1984 Feldstein took photographs of Oxford's 670 residents. Two decades later, Feldstein captured images of more than 100 of the original Oxford residents whose photographs he had taken in 1984. Bloom interviewed each person photographed. The product of Bloom and Feldstein's work is a series of large triptychs, incorporating images and text. Stories about the project have appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, London Weekend Guardian Magazine, ABC World News Tonight, National Public Radio, Washington Post, Shanghai Morning Post, and ArtWorks Magazine. An exhibit of the Oxford Project was held at the Des Moines Art Center February 8 - May 6, 2007, and traveling exhibits have taken the project throughout Iowa. The Oxford Project was part of Art Chicago 2007. A large-format book, The Oxford Project: Who We Are will be published by Welcome Books in the fall of 2008.

Bloom's dramatic play, Shoedog, co-written with colleague Brian Cronk, premiered November, 2003 at the Quad City Arts Center in Rock Island, Illinois.  Shoedog has been described as a piercing, nostalgic play with bite. With the backdrop of a failing family business, Murray, a master salesman, connives to bring a young recruit into the dying profession of selling shoes. Sales to Murray and other so-called "shoedogs," is an art form, a huckster's world of fast-talking con men and customers primed to be duped. With grants from The University of Iowa's Year of the Arts and Humanities program, the Iowa Arts Council, Rotary International, and Friends of Carnegie-Stout Public Library, Shoedog was performed in November at the Five Flags Theatre in Dubuque and at the McCreary Theatre in Perry, Iowa.

Bloom's short story, "The Swedish Wife," appeared in The Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Letters and Life in winter 2003 . Bloom's short story, "The Reptile King of Atlanta," about an itinerant lizard and gecko salesman, appeared in Wapsipinicon Almanac in 2005. Another story by Bloom, "Is Everyone Batty, or What?" appeared in DoubleThink magazine in 2005. Bloom's take on the priorities of university life, "Ode to Sheila"; his appreciation of novelist/teacher Frank Conroy, "The Writer's Writer"; and "The Academy of the Overrated: Hello Sy Hershman, Goodbye Bob Woodward," appeared in Inside Higher Education last year. Bloom's short story, "Ode to Maestro Järvi," about an irrepressible groupie who tails famed Detroit Symphony Conductor Neemi Järvi around the nation, appears in the current issue of Points of Entry: Cross-Currents in Storytelling. "The Last Time I Saw Martha," a short story about religious obligation vs. individual freedom, appears in the current issue of Mars Hill Review. Bloom's short story, "Anna Elena's Tongue," about cross-cultural gender differences, appears in Third Coast magazine in fall 2006.

Bloom is currently under contract with St. Martin's Press to write TEARS OF MERMAIDS, a nonfiction book that will chronicle the cultural, economic and political saga of pearls, the world's first and most enduring gem. The reader will enter a world of high rollers, high finance and high fashion. The story will begin with Columbus' third voyage to the New World, with the navigator's mission to bring back as many pearls as he could to satisfy Queen Isabella of Spain and her royal court. The book takes readers to the world's capitals of pearl trading: Japan, Australia, French Polynesia, China, and the Philippines. Reader will go behind the counter of the world's oldest pearl retailers - Tiffany & Co., Bulgari, Cartier, and Van Cleef & Arpels - as well as inside the 250-year-old auction houses of Sotheby's and Christie's. All the while, TEARS OF MERMAIDS will place into context the impact pearls have had on the history of the world. The book is detective story, tracking a central character - pearls - whose narrative timeline transcends 3,500 years, from Ancient Rome to the Age of the Internet.  TEARS OF MERMAIDS will be published in fall, 2009.