Gail Collins Speaker Biography
Author, Columnist, and First Woman Appointed Editor of the NY Times’ Editorial Page
Gail Collins joined The New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an Op-Ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times’s editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down as editor to finish her book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present but resumed her syndicated opinion column for the New York Times later in 2007. Ms. Collins also writes for “The Conversation,” a Times blog in which she discusses political issues with David Brooks.
Books
Beside When Everything Changed: The Amazing Story of American Women from 1960 to the Present (Little, Brown), Ms. Collins is the author of As Texas Goes: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda (Liveright/ WW Norton), American’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroine’s (Morrow / HarperCollins), William Henry Harrison (Times Books / Henry Holt), Scorpion Tongues: The Irresistible History of Gossip in American Politics (Morrow) and The Millennium Book: Your Essential All-Purpose Guide for the Year 2000 (Doubleday), which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins.
In her recent books, America’s Women and When Everything Changed, Ms. Collins offers insightful research and historical perspective, with characteristic wit and humanity. Reviewer Amy Bloom writes that Collins’ “smart, thorough, often droll and extremely readable account of women’s recent history” provides the “best summary of American women’s social and political history that I’ve read.” Of her columns, New York Magazine finds that “in an age of outbursts, Collins has subverted the pundit’s rude role, performing what amounts to a sly soft-shoe over a rising wave of ideological bombast.”
Education and Previous Experience
Ms. Collins earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism at Marquette and a master’s in government at University of Massachusetts. Before joining The Times, Ms. Collins was a columnist at New York Newsday and the New York Daily News, and a reporter for United Press International. Her first jobs in journalism were in Connecticut, where she founded the Connecticut State News Bureau (CSNB), which provided coverage of the state capitol and Connecticut politics.
Gail Collins Speaking Topics
Gail Collins Books
As Texas Goes…: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda
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William Henry Harrison: The American Presidents Series: The 9th President,1841
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