Hank Nuwer, Idaho, 1980, exploring the ghost town of Galena, Idaho, while in field interviewing sheepherders on magazine assignments.
Hank Nuwer is an author, novelist and actor based in Fairbanks, Alaska. His secondary residences are Warsaw, Poland and Union City, Indiana.
His performances as an actor in 2023-2025 include Ed (father) in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime, Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street, the Professor in University of Alaska’s Something in the Living Room, and Prince Escalus in Romeo and Juliet. In 2024, Hank Nuwer also acted in stage productions of Raisin in the Sun, King Lear and Ken Ludwig’s Twas the Night Before Christmas. Past roles include Lovborg in Hedda Gabler, Bottom and Flute in separate Midsummer Dream shows, and the Inventor in the Unknown Soldier and His Wife by Peter Ustinov. He has appeared as himself in many documentaries, most recently Brian Hurt’s Hazing.
His 25 books have titles such as Wrongs of Passage, High School Hazing, Broken Pledges: the Deadly Rite of Hazing and The Legend of Jesse Owens. Broken Pledges was adapted for the screen as an NBC-TV movie called Moment of Truth: Broken Pledges, with Linda Gray, Leon Russom and Barry Bonds, a San Francisco Giants baseball player. It was directed by Jorge Monte and filmed in Vancouver, Canada. Sons of the Dawn: A Basque Odyssey is open for an option or contract to film as a feature-length movie. Also available are his stories about America’s first fraternity death and the death of Henrietta Jackson as a bystander in a Cornell 1894 hazing incident involving chlorine.
Nuwer has been interviewed about ways to combat hazing and binge drinking by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, NBC Nightly News, Fox on Education, and the ABC Home Show.
Holder of a bachelor’s degree in English education from Buffalo State College (NY), he was named a BSC distinguished alum in 1999 and granted a State University of New York honorary Doctor of Human Letters (with actor Ruben Santiago-Hudson) in 2006 from Buffalo State. His master’s degree is in English from New Mexico Highlands University. He currently teaches journalism at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
Hank Nuwer inn FST’s King Lear