Biography, Hank Nuwer

Author Hank Nuwer‘s next hazing publication is his 2024 introduction to “Sport Hazing in the New Millenia.” The book’s editor is Professor Jay Johnson of the University of Manitoba {2024, Emerald Press). In 2023, he was the co-author of “Hazing in Fraternities and Sororities” with Elizabeth Allan in Gender-Based Crime: Learning Through Experts and Cases (edited by Kathleen A. Bogle), His last book is Hazing: Destroying Young Lives from Indiana University Press. Hank founded and continues to update the Buffalo State University Hazing Collection with archivist Daniel DiLandro. He is at work full-time on two new books in 2024 at his home in Fairbanks, Alaska, with wife Gosia Nuwer.

Malgorzata (Gosia) Wroblewska-Nuwer

See recent articles on Hank Nuwer in Athletic Business and his appearance in the movie Hazing by Byron Hurt.

Hank Nuwer also currently/recently performed in 2024 and 2023 theater productions at the University of Alaska; the Fairbanks Drama Association, and the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater. In 2024, he is acting in the University of Alaska (Fairbanks) spring production of “Something in the Living Room,” a combination film and full-length play by Alaska playwright Kavelina Torres.

Hank Nuwer’s blog includes his frequent published newspaper columns. His weekly column “Far from Randolph” also can be read every Thursday at the Winchester News-Gazette. Hank Nuwer began keeping a database about hazing deaths in 1975 and maintains the Hazing Deaths database. The first shorter database appeared in his article for Human Behavior magazine in 1978.  His first hard-hitting, book-length investigation of hazing deaths appeared in 1990; the title was Broken Pledges: the Deadly Rite of Hazing.

Gosia Nuwer and Hank Nuwer

Formerly, Nuwer was the winner of Ohio’s SPJ Best Columnist award (under 60,000 circulation newspapers) for his 2021 Daily Advocate column and managing editor at the Celina Daily Standard in Celina, Ohio. Concurrently, in 2022, he advised Ball State University’s “Inform Muncie” magazine and taught one course of journalism on campus as an adjunct professor.

Hank Nuwer is a former Shakespeare Fellow at the University of Bridgeport Shakespeare Institute. His additional roles have included both Bottom and Flute in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lovborg in Hedda Gabler, Adam in Adam and Eve and Other Things, and the German inventor in Peter Ustinov’s The Unknown Soldier and His Wife.

Hank has taught at a number of universities. In the Eighties, as assistant and associate professor, he advised the Ball State University Pacemaker student magazine expos yjen rated one of the best in the nation. He was named a best magazine adviser by the College Media Advisers. He also was Ball State’s nominee for CASE professor of the year, 1988. A member of the Ball State University Journalism Hall of Fame, he  also was a visiting professor at the University of Richmond (Virginia) for two years and advised one of the first collegiate online magazines in the nation.

He holds a master’s degree with honors in English from New Mexico Highlands University with election to Phi Kappa Phi national honor society. He also has taken creative writing classes in literary nonfiction and fiction at Hamline University and served as editor of Brushfire magazine at the University of Nevada. His undergraduate degree is from Buffalo State University. He is a 1999 Outstanding Buffalo State University alumnus (1999) and a 2006 honorary doctorate recipient from Buff State.  He is also a member of Alpha Lambda Delta honor society, Alpha Lamda Delta honor society, and Order of Omega Honor Society,

He has written additional books on the topic of hazing in society including Hazing: Destroying Young LivesWrongs of Passage, High School Hazing, and The Hazing Reader.His book, Rendezvousing with Contemporary Authors, has interviews with David Mamet, William Least Heat Moon, Kurt Vonnegut, Rosemary Rogers, James Dickey, John Jakes, Maurice Sendak and many other writers. Many of the interviews were reprinted in book collections dedicated to interviews with authors.

He has contributed articles to The Quill magazine, Limberlost Review and The Conversation. Other bylines of his over the years appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Santa Fe New Mexican, Orlando Sentinel, Buffalo Courier-Express and other newspapers. He has written books suitable for teens including his novel Sons of the Dawn, plus the nonfiction books High School Hazing, The Legend of Jesse Owens, Steroids and To the Young Writer.

Hank has an honorary doctorate from the State University of New York (Buffalo State, 2006) and taken additional graduate coursework at the University of Nevada and Hamline University.

Ball State University elected him in 2010 to the BSU Journalism Hall of Fame.

He is married to Malgorzata (Gosia) Wroblewska-Nuwer. He has two grown sons and two grandchildren. Gosia has one grown daughter, a Ph.D. in biology from Cambridge.

The couple lives in Fairbanks, Alaska; Warsaw, Poland; & Union City, Indiana.

Charitable work: He contributes regularly to HazingPrevention and the Buffalo State College Hank Nuwer Collection and BSC Hazing Collection managed by BSC archivist Daniel DiLandro.

Link to the Buffalo State Hank Nuwer Hazing Collection.

Hank’s crusading journalism to eradicate hazing was honored by the NGLA and HazingPrevention.org