BIO
Ethan Casey meeting with students at Cornell University, April 28, 2011.
Ethan Casey is a veteran journalist, editor, and author who has lived and traveled extensively in Asia since the 1980s. He has also visited Haiti many times, beginning in 1982 and most recently in September 2010.
His book Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) has been called “magnificent” by Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban and Descent into Chaos, “intelligent and compelling … the insights of a singular, clear-eyed and human traveler” by Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Mohsin Hamid, and “wonderful … a model of travel writing” by Edwidge Danticat. About his follow-up, Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa has said, “Ethan Casey makes no claim to dispassion, and it is this personal perspective that lends the book much of its charm and veracity and makes Overtaken By Events so compulsively readable.” He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti, for publication in early 2012.
He writes a weekly column for the Pakistani daily newspaper Dawn and contributes often to The Huffington Post, as well as writing frequently on his own website. He is a frequent public speaker. In his writing and speaking, he uses his position as an American traveler, journalist and author with 15 years’ exposure to Pakistan to help foster historical and geographical perspective, human connections, and conversation between Americans and Pakistanis. He also is concerned to help improve Americans’ awareness of both the historic and the contemporary situation in Haiti.
Based in Bangkok in the 1990s, he worked as a foreign correspondent writing for The Globe and Mail, the Boston Globe, the South China Morning Post, and the Observer News Service, among other publications. He interviewed Aung San Suu Kyi; witnessed the July 1997 coup d’etat in Cambodia; interviewed Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Sukarno and later herself President of Indonesia; interviewed Corazon Aquino on the 10th anniversary of the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos; was in Kathmandu in July 1994 for the fall of the first elected government of Nepal after the 1990 anti-royalist revolution and covered the November 1994 elections; and lived through the collapse of the Thai baht and other Asian currencies.
He also traveled throughout the subcontinent in the 1990s, including Jammu & Kashmir State near the height of the separatist rebellion there. His interest in Kashmir and in the subcontinent’s Muslims led him to visit Pakistan for the first time in 1995. He visited the Line of Control during the 1999 Kargil crisis and accepted an invitation in 2003 to spend a semester as a founding faculty member of the School of Media and Communication at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore.
Based in London from 1998 until 2005, he covered crises in Zimbabwe and Haiti and edited several book-length article collections, notably 09/11 8:48 a.m.: Documenting America’s Greatest Tragedy (in collaboration with Jay Rosen and the New York University Department of Journalism), published at the end of September 2001. John Sutherland in The Guardian called 09/11 8:48 a.m. “choral … subjected to stringent editing … more complete (because truer to the event) than if it arrived next Easter.”
Ethan Casey is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1991). He grew up in Wisconsin and now lives in Seattle. He posts short comments and links frequently on his Facebook page.
