Conover’s career in immersive journalism has taken him from a nuanced exploration of local culture for his 1991 title Whiteout: Lost in Aspen to a year-long stint as a prison guard resulting in Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. For his latest critically-acclaimed book released this earlier month, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge, Conover returned to his home state, living off and on for four years in the San Luis Valley in an effort to better understand the divisions that have increasingly riven the American social and political consciousness. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and National Geographic. He is a professor at, and the former director of, New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

About the book: a noteworthy review

"Nothing motivates the journalist Ted Conover like a no-trespassing sign. . . . One of Conover’s strengths as a writer is that he is willing to let his subjects ‘say their piece.’ He is wonderfully open to people’s understanding of themselves, even when he sees the world very differently. . . . With his thorough and compassionate reportage, Conover conjures a vivid, mysterious subculture populated by men and women with riveting stories to tell. To read Cheap Land Colorado is to take a drive through a disquieting, beguiling landscape with an openhearted guide, windows down, snacks in the cooler, no GPS. It’s a ride I didn’t want to end.” –  The Washington Post