Frank Bruni

Life and career

Bruni graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1986 with a B.A. in English. He was a Morehead Scholar and wrote for the student paper, The Daily Tar Heel. Bruni graduated second in his class with a master of science degree in journalism from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where he also won a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.

Straight out of Columbia, Bruni joined the staff of the New York Post and then moved on to the Detroit Free Press, where he did a wide range of beats, including a stint covering the Persian Gulf War. He spent more than a year as the movie critic and also wrote extensively about gay issues and AIDS. In 1993, he was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for his profile of a convicted child molester. In 1995, Bruni took a job with The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter and often wrote for The Times's Sunday magazine 'and' for Sunday Arts. In 1998, he was assigned to the Washington, D.C., bureau, where he covered Capitol Hill and Congress, before being sent on the campaign trail to follow then-Texas Governor George W. Bush. He then covered the White House for the first eight months of the Bush administration and served as the Washington-based staff writer for Sunday magazine. In July 2002, he was promoted to the Rome bureau chief. Two years later, he became The Times's restaurant critic. After five years in that position, he returned briefly to the magazine before becoming an op-ed columnist.

Bruni’s book Ambling into History chronicles his time covering Bush’s campaign. Born Round deals in part with his time as The Times's restaurant critic and was named one of the best nonfiction books of 2009 by the Times, Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post and Amazon.com. In The Times's Sunday Book Review, Dominique Browning raved that "the love with which Bruni writes about his family is breathtaking." Publishers Weekly deemed Born Round a "powerful, honest book about desire, shame, identity and self-image."

Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be was published by Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group, in March 2015 and was reissued in an expanded, updated paperback a year later. In a review of it in The Washington Post, Wesleyan University President Michael Roth called it "a humane, measured book" with "lessons for a very wide audience indeed." Grand Central is set to publish Bruni's first cookbook, written with his Times colleague Jennifer Steinhauer, in February 2017. Titled A Meatloaf in Every Oven: Two Chatty Cooks, One Iconic Dish and Dozens of Recipes from Mom's to Mario Batali's it includes recipes from such prominent chefs as Bobby Flay and April Bloomfield, in addition to Mario Batali.

Bruni has also done extensive reporting on religion and is the author, with Elinor Burkett, of A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church. His freelance work has appeared in several magazines, including Conde Nast Traveler. A frequent commentator on television news shows, especially on CNN and MSNBC, Bruni also served as a guest judge on Top Chef and appeared briefly in the movie Julie & Julia. And in the spring of 2014, he taught a journalism seminar at Princeton University.

In 2016, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association gave him its Randy Shilts Award for his career-long contribution to LGBT Americans. He was previously awarded the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Newspaper Columnist in 2012 and 2013.

Personal

Bruni is openly gay. He has struggled with his eating and bulimia.