I wrote Chris Floyd and asked him to please, if it was not too rude to ask

[acmavm]

provide some information on himself. I admire his writings and I just had to know. Here's the response:

Dear Ms XXXXXXX,

Thanks for the message and the kind words. They're much appreciated it. I
write regularly for the Moscow Times because that's where the column
originated in 1996, when I was still living in Moscow. I write for a few
other places intermittently, but because I have a day job, I haven't really
been able to do as much journalism as I'd like.

I'm supposed to have an "e-book" coming out next month -- or so the
publisher tells me -- after having failed a couple of times to get a "tree
book" published. It's a collection of columns on the Bush years, with some
connecting material, called "Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the
Bush Regime." I go into all this arcana by way of explaining that there is
an author's bio with the book, which I'm appending below. I just didn't want
you to think I had some self-puffing blurb sitting around on my computer
without a good reason for it. Anyway, for anyone who's curious about my
background, this should tell them more than they'd ever want to know.

Again, many thanks for your letter. I'm a big DU fan myself, have been
checking it regularly for a long time.

Yours,
Chris F.

About the Author

Chris Floyd is an American journalist. He has been a writer and editor for
more than 20 years, working in the United States, Great Britain and Russia
for various newspapers, magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford
University.

His career began in the hills and valleys of Tennessee and down in the piney
swamps of southern Mississippi, covering moonshine raids, shotgun murders,
drug-running evangelists, racial conflicts, the economic ravages of the
Reagan Administration, and the relentless, turbulent campaign of the
Religious Right to gain political power and cultural dominance throughout
the "heartland." He returned to his home ground in the late 1990s, where he
won awards for his coverage of a deadly hostage shootout and a bloody melee
between county officials - swapping charges of corruption and adultery - at
a school board meeting.

Floyd spent several years in the depths of the military-industrial complex,
working for a security-restricted federal research laboratory on projects
dealing with energy conservation, global warming, space travel,
transportation, robotics, artificial intelligence and military logistics. On
the side, he published fiction and poetry in various now-forgotten journals
and taught Russian literature at the University of Tennessee. Later, he
annotated Shakespeare, 19th century British poetry and American literature
for a start-up company producing multi-media CD editions of literary works
for colleges and schools.

In 1994, he made his way to Russia, where he joined the Moscow Times, an
English-language daily and one of the first independent newspapers of the
post-Soviet era. There he spent two years - the high casino of the
tumultuous Yeltsin era - and began writing the "Global Eye" column, which he
continued after returning to the United States in 1996. He was also the
Times' movie reviewer from 1996 to 2000.

From 1998 to 2000, Floyd was the editor of Science & Spirit, an Oxford
quarterly journal dealing with the contentious relationship between science
and religion. His work there included interviews with such thinkers as
Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Frans de Waal, V.S.
Ramachandran and others. He also worked with contributors from around the
world - Islamic scientists, Jewish theologians, militant atheists, Nobel
Prize-winning physicists, and authors such as Freeman Dyson, Paul Davies,
Lisa Jardine, A.N. Wilson, John Polkinghorne and others.

Since 2000, Floyd has worked as a freelance journalist and as a writer and
researcher for Oxford University. In addition to the "Global Eye," his work
is also published weekly in CounterPunch and the Bergen Record, and he is a
regular contributor to The Ecologist magazine and the Anderson Valley
Advertiser. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, Columbia
Journalism Review, The Christian Science Monitor, the Baltimore Chronicle,
and on innumerable websites around the world, including Common Dreams,
Buzzflash, Democrats.com, BushWatch, The Smirking Chimp, Cursor, Make Them
Accountable and many others.

His story, "Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism," was
chosen as one of Project Censored's "Top 25 Stories of 2002/2003." His
pieces have been anthologized in Media Democracy in Action: Censored 2004,
and the I Hate Republicans Reader. He also speaks occasionally on American
radio, where his mumbling Southern drawl has befuddled listeners in New
York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

[enough]

1. Thank you, acmavm.

I've often wondered about Chris Floyd, who seems to have the ability to express the god-awful truth in ways that seem stunningly obvious, but never quite said before.

HIs history is fascinating. Encompasses a lot of the modern world (and the old world too, it seems).

Neat to know he reads DU, where he has a number of fans.

[glitch]

2. thanks for this

I am also a fan of Chris Floyd. I knew he was an excellent researcher and writer, what an impressive bio!