Connie Schultz

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and author of the New York Times bestselling novel, The Daughters of Erietown. She is a Professor of Practice in Journalism at Denison University. She writes a weekly essay for Substack at Hopefully Yours.

In 2005, Schultz won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for columns that judges praised for providing “a voice for the underdog and the underprivileged.” That year she also won the Scripps Howard and National Headliner journalism awards for commentary. In 2003, she was a Pulitzer finalist for her series The Burden of Innocence, which chronicled the ordeal of a Michael Green, a Black man who was falsely incarcerated for 13 years for a rape he did not commit. A week after her series ran, the real rapist turned himself in.

Schultz is also a fellow with the Vietnam Reporting Project. Her 2011 series, “Unfinished Business,” explored the long-term impact of Agent Orange in the United States and in Vietnam. The series won the Associated Press Managing Editors Journalism Excellence Award in International Perspective.

In addition to her novel, Schultz is the author of two other non-fiction books published by Random House: Life Happens – And Other Unavoidable Truths, a collection of essays, and …and His Lovely Wife, a memoir about her husband Sherrod Brown’s successful 2006 race for the U.S. Senate. Her first children’s book, Lola and the Troll, was published in February 2024. She is currently working on her next novel.

Schultz and Brown have four grown children and eight grandchildren. They live in Cleveland, Ohio with their rescue dogs, Franklin and Walter.