Craig Brandon is the author of six books about popular history and public affairs, and a former award-winning education reporter. He later spent twelve years teaching journalism and advised the multiple award-winning student newspaper at a four-year liberal arts college in New England.
Craig spent 20 years as an education reporter, general assignment reporter, columnist and editor at newspapers in Upstate New York, including the Utica Observer Dispatch and the Albany Times Union. His writing and reporting won awards from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Associated Press, the National School Boards Association, the New York State United Teachers, the Gannett Foundation and Hearst newspapers. He also won first prize in investigative reporting from the Education Writers Association for a series of articles about how school administrators were using vocational students to build houses for them.
He was director of communications for the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany from 1993 to 1995 and was technical advisor for a segment of the “Unsolved Mysteries” television program and the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “An American Tragedy” in 2005. He has appeared a number of times on the History Channel, the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio to talk about his books and has been interviewed about them by newspapers throughout the country, including the New York Times and the Boston Globe. He also served as an on-camera expert for “The Day They Died” on the History Channel.”
Craig spends his free time hiking Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire and performing with the Jack in the Green morris dancers.
Craig’s other books include:
Murder in the Adirondacks: An American Tragedy Revisited. (1986) The true story of the 1906 murder case that Theodore Dreiser used for “An American Tragedy.” Now in its 15th printing, the book was selected for the community pro-literacy reading project called “Amsterdam Reads” in 2009 and for “Cayuga Reads” in 2010.
The Electric Chair: An Unnatural American History. (1999) The first book-length history of the electric chair. First published in 1999, it was republished in paperback by McFarland and Co. in 2009.
Monadnock: More than a Mountain. (2007) An historical, cultural and sociological history of the most-hiked mountain in North America, beloved of Thoreau and Emerson, which attracts 100,000 hikers a year.
