David Simon

Author, Creator 

David Simon, 49, is a Baltimore-based journalist, author and television producer. Born in Washington, he came to Baltimore in 1983 to work as a crime reporter at The Baltimore Sun. While at the paper, he reported and wrote two works of narrative non-fiction, Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, the former an account of a year spent with the city homicide squad and the latter, a year spent on a West Baltimore drug corner.

Homicide became the basis for the NBC drama which aired from 1993 to 1999 and for which Simon worked as a writer and producer after leaving The Sun in 1995. The Corner became an HBO miniseries and won three Emmy Awards in 2000. "The Wire", a subsequent HBO drama, aired from 2002 to 2008 and depicted a dystrophic American city contending with a fraudulent drug war, the loss of its industrial base, political and educational systems incapable of reform and a media culture oblivious to all of the above.

Also last year, Simon served as a writer and executive producer of HBO's "Generation Kill", a miniseries depicting U.S. Marines in the early days of the Iraq conflict. He is currently at work on a drama about post-Katrina New Orleans entitled "Treme." Simon also does prose work for The New Yorker, Esquire and The Washington Post, among other publications.