Dan Baum is the author of “Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans,” “Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure,” and “Citizen Coors: An American Dynasty.”

Born in New Jersey, Baum has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, where he covered the military, the tsunami in Southeast Asia, and the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans. He’s been a reporter for the Anchorage Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Asian Wall Street Journal, and The Wall Street Journal. Since 1987, he has worked as a freelance journalist along with his wife, Margaret L. Knox; first in Africa, and later in Montana, Mexico, California, and Colorado. All their work is collaborative; together they have written for Smithsonian, Mother Jones, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and other publications.

Baum and Knox live Boulder, Colorado, with their sixteen-year-old daughter, Rosa.