[close] Ann Hagedorn was born in Dayton, Ohio and grew up in Dayton, Kansas City and Cleveland. She earned a B.A. in history from Denison University, an M.S. in information science from the University of Michigan, and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University.

Her first professional job was on the library faculty at the University of Kansas, where she worked as a research librarian and later directed a grant-funded project to compile a reference book on the history of economics. In pursuit of a writing career, she moved to New York City, where she found both a job and a place to live via New York University: a position on the library faculty writing speeches, brochures, and grant proposals, and an NYU apartment on Washington Square Park. Two years later, she began her master's work at Columbia. She also holds a German language proficiency degree from the Goethe Institut, at Prien-am-Chiemsee, Germany and studied at Yale University under the tutelage of Arna Bontemps, esteemed participant in the Harlem Renaissance, for the purpose of writing her college senior thesis on the Harlem Renaissance writers.

Hagedorn took her first newspaper job at the San Jose Mercury News where she wrote about crime and covered trials in San Francisco's East Bay region. Her next job was writing for the Wall Street Journal in New York City where she reported on a broad range of subjects, writing front page stories on violent crime in shopping malls, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the longest criminal trial in U.S. history (the McMartin child molestation case), issues of geriatric convicts in federal prisons, securities fraud and pennystock fraud on Wall Street, the travails of takeover artist Paul Bilzerian, the rise and fall of Sasson jeans king Paul Guez, and litigation against dogs, especially in canine court in Los Angeles, among others. She also wrote about legal issues, bankruptcy cases and numerous federal trials.

In 1991, Hagedorn focused her knowledge of fraud and bankruptcy on probing the collapse of America's premier horseracing dynasty, Calumet Farm. The result was the highly acclaimed book Wild Ride: The Rise and Tragic Fall of Calumet Farm, Inc., a story of greed and intrigue in the 1980s that is now under option with Paramount Pictures. The author left the WSJ in late 1993 to join the New York Daily News as Special Projects Editor. There, in addition to overseeing projects, she wrote multi-part series on geriatric inmates in New York prisons, New York lawyers who were laundering money for Colombian drug cartels, capital punishment, and a four-part series on George Steinbrenner and the bankruptcy of his shipbuilding empire ( which won an Associated Press award.) Next, she wrote a mini-sequel for the Wild Ride paperback edition and began researching and writing Ransom. After the release of Ransom, Hagedorn wrote a piece for The Washington Post and taught a narrative non-fiction writing course at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where she had been giving lectures in various classes for several years. During that time, she discovered a stunning story in the Ohio River Valley that resulted in her third book Beyond the River, now under option with Clear Pictures Inc. After writing Beyond the River, she taught a writing course at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois and while in Chicago she began the research for Savage Peace.

Currently, she is writing another book and working with a group of writers to launch the Late Bloomers School of Writing. When not writing, reading or teaching, she is canoeing, bicycling or learning to play the fiddle and the concertina. [close]