Staff writer

Office phone: 757-446-2352

Email: earl.swift@pilotonline.com

Earl Swift is a member of a four-member team of writers who specialize in narrative writing.

Earl has written for newspapers in St. Louis and Anchorage and, since 1987, at The Virginian-Pilot, where he’s been a beat reporter, columnist, editor and feature writer. He’s been on the paper’s narrative team since its inception in 1998.

Over the years, Swift’s editors have dispatched him to Europe, Asia, a good many of the 50 states and throughout Virginia in pursuit of subjects from bridal fashions to aircraft carriers. His stories often draw strong reaction from Pilot readers, and have won numerous national, state and regional awards.

Swift’s book Where They Lay (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) grew out of a 2000 Pilot assignment to Vietnam. The book was a finalist for the prestigious PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and will be reissued in paperback in Summer 2005. Another assignment for the paper, in which Swift canoed the 435-mile James River, yielded a 22-part series and his 2001 history-travelogue Journey on the James (University of Virginia Press). That book, too, has been reissued in paperback.

An avid outdoorsman, Swift has backpacked the Appalachian Trail, circumnavigated the Chesapeake Bay by kayak, lived at the top of a lighthouse and searched the New Zealand bush for giant birds. He was a Fulbright fellow in 1994.

He lives in Norfolk with his 11-year-old daughter, Saylor. The pair keep frequent company with his girlfriend, Amy, her two sons, and a dog codenamed Mr. Wickers.