Roy Peter Clark

Roy Peter Clark
Clark at the 2011 Texas Book Festival
Born	1948 (age 68–69) New York City, U.S.
Education	Providence College, B.A. (1970) State University of New York at Stony Book, PhD
Occupation	Journalist Teacher
Years active	1974–present
Notable credit(s)	Writing Tools The Glamour of Grammar Help! For Writers
Spouse(s)	Karen

Roy Peter Clark (born 1948) is an American writer, editor, and teacher of writing who has become a writing coach to an international community of students, journalists, and writers of many sorts. He is also senior scholar and vice president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a journalism think-tank in St. Petersburg, Florida, and is the founder of the National Writers Workshop. Clark has appeared on several radio and television talk shows, speaking about ethics in journalism and other writing issues.

Clark is a native of the Lower East Side of New York City, and was raised on Long Island. His mother was of half-Italian and half-Jewish ancestry (Clark was raised Catholic). Clark earned a degree in English (1970) from Providence College, Rhode Island, where he was editor of The Alembic, a literary journal, and managing editor of the student-run newspaper, The Cowl. From there, Clark earned a Ph.D. in English, specializing in medieval literature, from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

In 1974, Clark accepted a position teaching English at Auburn University at Montgomery, Alabama. Newspaper columns he wrote during that time attracted the attention of Eugene Patterson, editor of the St. Petersburg Times. Patterson hired Clark in 1977 as a reporter and to work with the newspaper’s staff as a writing coach.

In 1979, Clark became a faculty member at, and has spent more than thirty years working in various positions with the Poynter Institute, the non-profit organization that now owns Times Publishing Company, which publishes the St. Petersburg Times. Clark is listed as one of the Directors and Officers of The Poynter Institute Andrea Pitzer, writing for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, has called Clark “one of narrative journalism’s hardest working midwives.”