Mark Fritz

Mark Fritz is a war correspondent and author. A native of Detroit and graduate of Wayne State University, Fritz won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1995 for his stories about the Rwandan genocide. He's the author of Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World, the satirical Permanent Deadline, and the upcoming Crashing in America, a memoir.

Fritz interned at the Detroit News in 1977, which included working weekends at the city's legendary--and brutal--1300 Beubien police beat. He spent nearly six years at the Kalamazoo (Mich) Gazette, covering every beat imaginable. Fritz joined the Associated Press in Detroit already a veteran, award-winning reporter. He was a staff writer for the AP from 1984-1997, and again in 2003. Fritz reported on the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Chechnya, and Liberia, among others. As a Page One investigative reporter for the Boston Globe, Fritz filed from the scene of the World Trade Center's destruction. As an AP editor on the Foreign Desk, he filed the first U.S. "A-wire" bulletin on the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

Fritz subsequently was named East Berlin correspondent, then West Africa correspondent covering 23 countries. Fritz also served stints on the agency's computer-assisted investigative reporting team and as roving foreign correspondent for the International Desk in New York. He later worked as a New York-based national writer for the Los Angeles Times (1997—2000), followed by stints as an investigative reporter at the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal.

He left the news business for a stretch to write books and perform humanitarian work in the Darfur region of Sudan for the International Rescue Committee, and conduct war crimes investigations for Human Rights Watch in Uganda.

Fritz's nonfiction book, "Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World," chronicles the stories of people uprooted by the wars that broke out at the end of the Cold War. He is also the author of the novel "Permanent Deadline," a black comedy about war and the creaky machine that was Big Media. The author can't authorize, or even count, the variety of pirated versions floating around, but "Permanent Deadline" is free on Kindle.

Among other honors, Fritz won the deadline writing awards from the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) in 1995, the latter the wire service's highest honor. His work is featured in numerous textbooks and journalism anthologies.