Patrick T. Reardon

Patrick T. Reardon is the author of seven poetry collections, including Requiem for David, Darkness on the Face of the Deep and Puddin’: The Autobiography of a Baby, A Memoir in Prose Poems.

His poetry has appeared in many journals, including Commonweal, America, Poetry East, Rhino, Main Street Rag, After Hours, Autumn Sky, Solum Literary Press, Burningword Literary Journal, The Write Launch, Meat for Tea and Under a Warm Green Linden. His poem “The archangel Michael” was a finalist for the 2022 Mary Blinn Poetry Prize. He has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize.

For 32 years, Reardon, a lifelong Chicagoan, worked as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, specializing in in-depth reports on the city and its region. He was one of a team of fifty Tribune reporters, photographers and editors who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for “Gateway to Gridlock,” a series of stories about the nation’s over-crowded skies.

In addition, while covering the book industry for the newspaper, Reardon interviewed such literary stars as Sandra Cisneros and Jane Smiley, Richard Russo and Antonia Fraser, Terry Pratchett and Gay Talese, Robert Caro and Anne Rice. He later said that each interview was essentially a tutorial in the art of writing.

An expert in Chicago history, Reardon wrote the definitive book on the city’s downtown and elevated rapid transit junction The Loop, The “L” Tracks That Saved and Shaped Chicago, published in 2020 by Southern Illinois University Press. He has also published academic articles in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society.

Among his fifteen books, he is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence: A Discordant Pilgrimage through Shusaku Endo’s “Silence,” literary-religious analysis of Endo’s great novel. His essays have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Crain’s Chicago Business, National Catholic Reporter and the Irish magazine Reality.