CARPENTER, Teresa Suzanne
CARPENTER, LEVY
Posted By: Sharon R Becker (email)
Date: 1/10/2016 at 11:36:24
BIOGRAPHY of TERESA SUZANNE CARPENTER
Graceland University, Lamoni, IowaTeresa Suzanne Carpenter was born on August 1, 1948, in Independence, Missouri.
At the age of 16, Teresa Carpenter had her first writing material published in the Independence Examiner newspaper, and was later named outstanding journalism student at Truman High School in Independence, where she graduated at the top one percent of her class. As a Graceland student, she was active on the Acacia, Tower, and Pierian, and graduated magna cum lade, obtaining her degree in English in 1970. Carpenter then worked for a Japanese business publication in Hawaii, completed her master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1975, and became a senior editor at New Jersey Monthly. She quit in 1979 to become a freelance writer, with most of her material being published by the Villiage Voice of New York. That newspaper submitted three of her 1980 feature articles for the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
On April 15, 1981, the Graceland alumna received the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for feature writing on the basis of all three stories. Carpenter's winning stories were "Murder on a Day Pass" (about an institutionalized mental patient who killed his wife while on a three-day pass), "From Heroism to Madness: The Odyssey of the Man Who Shot Al Lowenstein" (about the murder of a former U.S. congressman), and "Death of a Playmate" (about the burder of Playboy magazine's 1980 Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten). Two days earlier, the Pulitzer had gone to Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who lost the award after soon admitting that she had faked her winning story "Jimmy's World" about an eight-year-old drug addict in the slums of Washington, D.C.
In addition to the Pulitzer, Carpenter received Graceland's Distinguished Service Award at that fall's homecoming. Her Dorothy Stratten story later became the basis of the movie Star 80.
Carpenter joined the Village Voice as a full-time writer in 1981 and eventurally became the author of books: Without a Doubt (1997, with Marcia Clark, about the O.J. Simpson trial), a New York Times #1 bestseller; Missing Beauty (1988), a New York Times bestseller; non-fiction book about Arlyne Brickman, a Mafia informant and mob moll, Mob Girl: A Woman's Life in the Underworld (1992, published by Simon & Schuster); and The Miss Stone Affair (2003).
Her articles in the Village Voice in the 1980's won the Pulitzer Prize for best feature writing, as well as two Clarion awards, the Page One award, and the Front Page award. She is also the editor of New York Diaries 1609-2009.
Carpenter resides in New York's Greenwich Village with her husband, Steven Levy, who is a senior staff writer of Wired magazine and the author of Hackers.
SOURCES:
Goehner, David. “The Graceland College Book of Knowledge: From A To Z.” Pp. 396-97. Herald House. Independence MO. 1997.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_Carpenter
Transcriptions & compilation by Sharon R. Becker, January of 2016
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