Sam Verhovek CV (PDF)

Biography

Sam Howe Verhovek, the author of “Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World,” is a former national correspondent for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He has been writing for newspapers since high school, and was editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily during his senior year of college. After graduation he was hired by New York Times columnist and editor James Reston for a one-year “clerkship” to serve as Mr. Reston’s assistant in the Washington bureau. He also worked as a reporter for the Asahi Evening News in Tokyo and as a journalism  teacher in Beijing before returning to The New York Times as a metro reporter in New York. He was the Bronx bureau chief and a state house reporter in Albany before becoming a national correspondent for the Times in 1993, covering Texas and the Southwest  as Houston bureau chief. From 1998 to 2002 he was the Seattle bureau chief, covering the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. In 2002 he joined the Los Angeles Times as a Seattle-based national correspondent, and also worked for the paper as foreign correspondent in the Middle East and in Shanghai. His newspaper career took him all over the five boroughs of New York City, to all 50 states of the United States, and to five continents, covering stories as far-flung as riots in India, a coup in Fiji, the rise of China, the war in Iraq and the kids with the longest daily school bus ride in America, in the Big Bend of Texas. In recent years he has written about outer space exploration for Popular Science and  Discover magazines. A Boston native, he lives in Seattle with his wife, Lisa, and their children, Gordie, Alice, and Johnny.