Ithaca College

Cole Louison '00 will give a talk, entitled "A Writer's Life: The Path of a Newspaper, Public Radio, and Magazine Reporter," on Monday, April 20, at 7:30 p.m. in Textor 102. Louison is a writer for GQ magazine and contributes to Fader, McSweeney's, the New York Times, Buzzsaw, All Things Considered, and others.

The lecture is part of the Park School Writing Award Speaker Series. Past speakers have included travel writer Susan Orlean and Rick Frishman, author, publisher, and public relations practitioner.

Louison graduated from Ithaca College in 2000. While majoring in journalism at the Park School of Communications, he reported for the Ithacan, helped found Buzzsaw Haircut, and freelanced for the Ithaca Journal.

Upon graduation he moved to Martha’s Vineyard and began reporting for the Vineyard Gazette. While there, he became an island correspondent for WGBH Boston NPR and later moved to Cape Cod to work further for the station.

After a sunless year on the Cape, a Vermont art colony offered him a writing grant, moving him to the rural hamlet of Johnson, Vermont. A one-month residency turned into a job offer, and a year was spent in the glorious green mountains before selling the truck and moving to New York City in fall 2004. Once there he became an editor at McSweeney’s Quarterly Journal, joined the New Yorker softball team, and temped for Vogue, Esquire, and Vanity Fair before coming to GQ, where he works today while continuing to write on a freelance basis.

For GQ he has covered a variety of subjects and interviewed Bill Clinton, Reggie Miller, Dave Navarro, Big Boi, Mohammad Ali, Ted Nugent, Don King, David Remnick, the world authority on Samuel Beckett, Jim Jarmusch, and Jean-Claude Killy. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Outside, and the Los Angeles Times.