David Simon

David Simon, 49, is a Baltimore-based journalist, author and television producer. Born in Washington, he came to Baltimore in 1983 to work as a crime reporter at The Baltimore Sun. While at the paper, he reported and wrote two works of narrative non-fiction, Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, the former an account of a year spent with the city homicide squad and the latter, a year spent on a West Baltimore drug corner.

Homicide became the basis for the NBC drama which aired from 1993 to 1999 and for which Simon worked as a writer and producer after leaving The Sun in 1995. The Corner became an HBO miniseries and won three Emmy Awards in 2000. The Wire, a subsequent HBO drama, aired from 2002 to 2008 and depicted a dystopic American city contending with a fraudulent drug war, the loss of its industrial base, political and educational systems incapable of reform and a media culture oblivious to all of the above.

Also last year, Simon served as a writer and executive producer of HBO's Generation Kill, a miniseries depicting U.S. Marines in the early days of the Iraq conflict. He is currently at work on a drama about post-Katrina New Orleans entitled Treme, which is slated to be broadcast on HBO in 2010. Simon also does prose work for The New Yorker, Esquire and The Washington Post, among other publications.