User:Lizvandurme/Doug Levitt

Doug Levitt
Doug Levitt is a singer-songwriter, author and activist whose five-year project Greyhound Diaries tells the story of America – and Americans – at the crossroads. Modeled on WPA-era programs, like those of Woody Guthrie and others, Greyhound Diaries has led the artist to travel more than 50,000 miles by bus listening to people’s stories of struggle and transformation and capturing them in songs, stories, and images.

Levitt has been profiled by numerous national news outlets including CNN, Fox, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and Billboard magazine. He was an early surrogate for President Barack Obama's presidential campaign, speaking and performing on the candidate’s behalf.

His first EP, Greyhound Diaries, produced by David Henry (Guster, Josh Rouse, Yo La Tengo, is in regular radio rotation on stations like XM’s The Loft and his first published book, Greyhound Diaries: Eastbound Edition, is a preface to upcoming editions. Levitt is also developing Greyhound Diaries as a radio series for NPR distribution.

A graduate of the D.C. public schools, Levitt earned his bachelors at Cornell University, where he majored in Government and studied Critical Thinking directly under Carl Sagan, the late author and astrophysicist.

Upon graduating, Levitt’s first career was as a foreign correspondent. Based in London, he reported from places such as Iran, Rwanda and Bosnia for, along other, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC. Whine in London, Levitt received his masters in International Relations from the London School of Economics where he focused on Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict of the sort he saw up close in war zones.

While seeking a broader canvas to tell stories, Levitt turned his focus to his artistic career, becoming what he describes in his first book as “a downwardly mobile singer-songwriter.” After receiving a Fulbright Scholarship, Levitt returned to the States where he chose to treat America as he would a foreign country in crisis – only with a guitar and an iBook covered in duct tape. Using as many skills as he could ring to bear, he committed his work to making human our common struggles- and triumphs, and to do so through the eyes and voices of those for whom daily like is a kind of epic.”