Penn State Forum Speaker Series - Mar. 15, 2010

Justin Catanoso

Author

"My Cousin the Saint: A Search for Faith, Family and Miracles"

Catanoso is a newspaper journalist, a university lecturer and the author of the memoir "My Cousin the Saint."  He is a native of North Wildwood, NJ, and considered attending only one college after high school -- Penn State.  It's a family tradition.  When he graduated from Penn State in 1982 with a bachelor's degree in journalism, he became the fourth member of his family to earn a Penn State diploma.  His father, Leonard, graduated in 1943, and his older brothers, Len Jr. and Alan, graduated in 1973 and 1977.

Catanoso wrote for The Daily Collegian for four years, coverning sports, arts and politics.  He was a weekly columnist his senior year -- the year the Collegian was named by Sigma Delta Chi as the best college newspaper in America.

Catanoso began his newspaper career with the Centre Daily Times.  He later worked for The Knoxville Journal in Tennessee and then the Greensboro News & Record in North Carolina.  In 1993, his pioneering reporting into fraud in the tobacco industry for the News & Record earned him a Pulitzer Prize nomination for public service.  In 1998, Catanoso left daily newspapers to become the founding executive editor of The Business Journal, where he still directs a staff in its weekly business coverage of the Triad region of North Carolina.

In 1993, he received a master of arts in liberal studies from Wake Forest University, and since then has been a visiting lecturer in journalism, teaching course in reporting, writing and editing.

"My Cousin the Saint," some of which is set at Penn State, was published by HarperCollins in May 2008 and was released in paperback last June.  It is Catanoso's first book.

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