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Stephen Bloom
stephen-g-bloom@uiowa.edu

Stephen G. Bloom is the author of Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (Harcourt, 2000) and Inside the Writer's Mind (Blackwell, 2002). A professor of journalism at the University of Iowa and a former reporter for the Dallas Morning News, Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, and Sacramento Bee, Bloom's essays have appeared The Wilson Quarterly, Nieman Reports, Smithsonian, DoubleTake, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, and Salon. His essay on how to tell a story recently appeared in Annals of Clinical Psychiatry.

Bloom is currently under contract with St. Martin’s Press to write Tears of Mermaids: The Secret History of Pearls, due out in 2008. The book uses pearls as a metaphor to explore the interconnections of global politics, world finance and haute couture.

Bloom is co-creator of two oral history projects: The Iowa Journalists Oral History Project, the world’s first video-streaming archive of journalists; and The Oxford Project, which spans two decades in the lives of residents of a rural Iowa town.

Contributions

Behind the Postville slaughterhouse raid
COMMENTARY | May 139, 2008
Journalism professor Stephen Bloom says one of the worst kept secrets in Iowa was that Agriprocessors, the largest kosher slaughterhouse in the world, had undocumented workers.

Immigration comes to the small-town Midwest
SHOWCASE | October 286, 2006
In a rich, informative essay, Stephen Bloom portrays the state of Iowa in a moment of great transition – in the midst of changing forever, as it were. The 2000 census counted 82,500 Hispanics in the state but there may be almost twice as many today, and by 2030, many believe, half of Iowa’s population of 3 million will belong to minority groups.

Iowa J-students did tough, breakthrough reporting on legalized gambling
SHOWCASE | August 221, 2006
No paper had examined the state's burgeoning gambling industry in a thorough, investigative way until Stephen Bloom put 12 students on the case for 15 weeks.