Colin Woodard, an award-winning author and journalist, is the director of Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University's Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. He is a contributing writer at Politico and a longtime correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has appeared in The Economist, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Newsweek, The Guardian, Bloomberg View, Washington Monthly and dozens of other national and international publications. A native of Maine, he has reported from more than fifty foreign countries and seven continents, and lived for five years in Eastern Europe during and after the collapse of communism. As State & National Affairs Writer at the Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. His fourth book, "American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America", is a Wall Street Journal bestseller that was named a Best Book of 2011 by the editors of The New Republic and the Globalist and won the 2012 Maine Literary Award for Non-Fiction. "The Republic of Pirates", a definitive biography of Blackbeard, Sam Bellamy, and other members of the most famous pirate gang in history, is a New York Times bestseller and was the basis of the 2014 NBC drama "Crossbones", starring John Malkovich. His latest is "Union: The Struggle to Forge a Story of United States Identity" (Viking Press, June 2020), which was named a Christian Science Monitor Book of the Year. His new book, Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America goes on sale from Viking Press Nov 4, 2025. He is also the author of "American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good", which was a finalist for the 2016 Chautauqua Prize and won the 2016 Maine Literary Prize for Non-fiction; the New England bestseller "The Lobster Coast", a cultural and environmental history of coastal Maine; "Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas", a narrative non-fiction account of the deterioration of the world's oceans. A graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago, he was a Pew Fellow in International Journalism at the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Study and is presently a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London. He lives in Midcoast Maine.
