Lou Ureneck

Lou Ureneck teaches journalism at Boston University. A former Nieman fellow and editor in residence at Harvard University, Ureneck was a newspaper editor, in Maine and Philadelphia. He was born in New Brunswick, N.J.

His most recent book, "The Great Fire: One American's Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century's First Genocide," tells the riveting story of a rescue operation led by a small-town minister from upstate New York. He saved more than a quarter-million people from the Ottoman city of Smyrna, the empire's richest city, and scene of the last terrifying episode of the genocide that killed millions of Armenians and Greeks at the beginning the last century. The story is both tragic and inspirational.

Ureneck's first book, "Backcast," won the National Outdoor Book Award for literary merit. His second book, Cabin, was about a cabin he built in the hills of western Maine. The book won him praise as a contemporary Thoreau.