Colin McEnroe

Writer & Host of the Award-Winning Colin McEnroe Show

Colin McEnroe

Writer & Host of the Award-Winning Colin McEnroe Show

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Biography

Colin McEnroe graduated with honors from Yale in 1976. His first job was with the Hartford Courant. His column, launched in 1982, still appears in the newspaper, and, as far as anyone can tell, is the longest-running column in the 250-year history of the newspaper. During the 1980s, Doubleday published two collections of his essays. Also during that decade he began to write for magazines. When Rupert Murdoch launched the magazine Mirabella, he was a contributing editor, with essays in every issue for the first two years. He has also written over the years for such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Forbes FYI, Men’s Heath, Best Life, Verge, Mademoiselle, Backpacker and Bicycling. He has held contributing editorships or columns at many of them. His humor-writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Funny Times, the New York Times op-ed page, and in several anthologies of American humor.

In 1992, Colin launched a daily talk radio show on WTIC-AM, where he stayed for 16 years, while continuing to write. In 2009, he created The Colin McEnroe Show on WNPR and its related stations. In 2014, President Obama appeared as a guest on the show.

Colin’s writing and radio work have won many national and state awards, the most recent being a 2016 and 2017 national PRNDI award, given by public radio news directors.

Public speaking and moderating onstage conversations make up another part of Colin’s career. He has moderated the Connecticut Forum a record-setting nine times, with such onstage panelists as Kurt Vonnegut, Carrie Brownstein, Andy Rooney, Morley Safer, Leslie Stahl, Joyce Carol Oates, John Irving, Alice Waters, Anthony Bourdain, Vince Gilligan and the creators and voices of “The Simpsons.” In other venues, he has orchestrated onstage conversations with Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, Al Franken, Molly Ivins, Anita Hill, Penn Jillette, Dany Glover, Noam Chomsky, HBO’s CEO Richard Pleple, and Matt Taibbi. In 2012, he founded the Freshly Squeezed onstage discussion series at Watkinson School which he still curates and hosts.

In 2003, Warner Books published Colin’s third book, a memoir. That year he also wrote the book for a musical produced at the Ivoryton Playhouse. He has worked extensively with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, writing and narrating spoken word elements for concerts. He recently wrote a series of dramatic pieces for the orchestra performed with Liszt’s Faust symphony in March 2017. He has narrated Peter and the Wolf with several orchestras, and in 2016, he provided the voice of the book in a production of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” starring Fred Grandy.

Colin taught a literary nonfiction writing course at Trinity College in the 1980s but left when he began his writing career. He came back in 2006 to teach a course on blogs when the form was new. Since then he has created and taught several media studies-oriented courses including one on Marshall McLuhan. In 2016, for the third time, he taught a course in Mass Media and the Presidential Election taught in real time during the campaign cycle.

Speech Topics

The Human Story

Colin McEnroe’s mother was an Alzheimer’s patient who also endured a whirlpool of other health issues. Her decline made it obvious to him that important decisions about her future would need to be made. We all have those we can trust and rely on to become our advocate in times of need, even when we have everything well laid out. Integrating advanced patient-directed care strategies is vital to improving quality of life and should play a role in every stage of our lives, not only end of life. We first need to have conversations and determine our own advanced care plans so that our wishes can be honored. With his trademark humor and natural storytelling, McEnroe imparts this message through personal stories while emphasizing the importance of having the conversation with caretakers and loved ones to ensure a patient’s wishes are known.