MEET BRYAN DENSON
From his office in Portland, Oregon, Bryan Denson juggles a lot of balls — but he’s best when juggling one at a time.
Veteran author and journalist Bryan Denson specializes in telling true stories cinematically. He's happiest when the story plays hard to get, requiring long hours of investigative lock picking. He immerses himself in the lives of his subjects, much like a method actor going deep into character, to reveal the souls of their stories.
Bryan's 33-year career at five daily newspapers, most recently The The Oregonian/OregonLive and The Houston Post, helped uncover scandal in the government’s biggest work program for disabled Americans; pressured the U.S. Air Force to rewrite deadly flight manual instructions for its primary transport plane; and exposed wasteful and duplicative efforts to clone monkeys at a national primate lab. His stories also laid bare Social Security’s glacial process of awarding disability benefits to those who desperately need them while wasting billions on those who don’t. Bryan’s award-winning series, “The Slaying of a Generation,” chronicled a 300 percent increase in the gunfire deaths of Houston's Black teens in the early 1990s.
His work has explained how an FBI agent's myopic supervision of a multiple-murder investigation inadvertently caused the rape of a teen-age girl, and how a small-town police department wrote $1 million in speeding tickets in just six months on a patch of highway outside its jurisdiction. His series "Death Without Decorum" uncovered horrifying abuses by funeral home operators across the Lone Star State. Bryan's award-winning narrative “Grave Injustice” explored the global black market for Native American antiquities through the prism of Jack Lee Harelson, the most prolific looter and grave robber in the American West. Harelson’s crimes – including the attempted murder-for-hire of a business partner, two judges, and the cop who brought him to justice – was the subject of a truTV special: “Grave Robber.”
More recently, The New York Times published Bryan’s previously untold story of the FBI’s bizarre undercover investigation of Craig Rosebraugh, a former spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front. He also teamed with reporter Conrad Wilson at Oregon Public Broadcasting to cover America’s vast political divide through the lens of antifa and right-wing extremist groups. He would later team with writer David Wolman to examine the CIA’s secretive program for defecting foreign spies, which appeared in The Economist/1843.
Bryan’s first book, The Spy’s Son, takes readers deep into life inside a CIA family, a federal prison, and into the colorful world of spies and spy catchers on four continents. The Atlantic Monthly Press published the book on May 5, 2015, and rights have sold in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, The Netherlands, Estonia, Japan, and Russia. CNN Declassified broadcast an hour-long segment on the story; film rights were sold to Paramount Pictures and Cross Creek Pictures; and the story has been featured in several podcasts, including Snap Judgment, the award-winning radio show on Public Radio International/PRX.
Bryan also wrote the FBI Files series for younger readers (Macmillan/Roaring Brook Press). The first , Unabomber: Agent Kathy Puckett and the Hunt for a Serial Bomber, published in June 2019. Book two, Catching a Russian Spy: Agent Leslie G. Wiser Jr. and the Case of Aldrich Ames, published in January 2020. Book three, Uncovering a Terrorist: Agent Ryan Dwyer and the Case of the Portland Bomb Plot, published in June 2020. Those books, along with The Spy’s Son, are on loan at nearly 2,000 libraries in five languages.
During his long career, Bryan has been awarded scores of national and regional journalism honors. He is a winner of the George Polk Award and the Michael E. DeBakey Journalism Award, and was a finalist for The Pulitzer Prize in national reporting. Bryan also was a finalist for the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, a second-place finisher in The Society for Features Journalism for news series and projects, and an honorable mention for the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. The Spy's Son was a finalist for the William E. Colby Award.
Bryan contributes stories to Newsweek and ProPublica and serves as a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. His longform stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, Maxim, Mother Jones, Reader's Digest, The New York Times, CNN, The Economist/1843, All About Beer, Nieman Reports, IRE Journal, Running Times, and his college newspaper, The Retriever. In 2022, Bryan began writing his first novel, which explores the nature of family and the peculiar and unexpected places we find it — inside and outside the ties of blood.
He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife Kristin Quinlan, the CEO of Certified Languages International. His son, Holden Denson, is a 2021 graduate of Columbia College Chicago. He stepson, Andrew Quinlan, is a sales implementation specialist; His stepdaughter, Austin Quero, is a registered nurse.
The author at the TGI Friday’s in Nicosia, Cyprus, a pivotal scene in The Spy’s Son.