Dan Connell was born in New Orleans, La., in 1944 and grew up in Chicago and the New York area before moving to New England, where he now lives with his wife, graphic designer Debbie Hird. His two children by an earlier marriage—Joanie (b. 1965) and Laura (b.1968)—live in California and Florida, as do his three very special granddaughters.

After finishing an M.A. in English at the University at Buffalo in 1968, Dan worked as a carpenter, farm-hand, house painter, junior high school science teacher, alternative-high-school administrator, book seller and freelance copy editor before traveling to Africa in 1975. He set out with a back pack, a notebook, a few dollars, and a burning curiosity about people’s struggles for liberation and democracy—and the U.S. role in opposing them—coming out of his experiences in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements. His life has never been the same.

Hitchhiking across Europe and riding third- and fourth-class trains up the Nile, he made his way to Ethiopia where, after months puzzling over the contradictions within that country’s brutal “socialist” revolution and between the ruling junta and the United States, which continued to arm it, he discovered the long-running but largely-hidden war for independence in Eritrea, a former Italian colony which Ethiopia forcibly annexed after WW2.

Talking his way onto a government supply convoy, he crossed guerrilla lines to reach the besieged Eritrean capital, Asmara. There he witnessed the assassination of a high-ranking Ethiopian official and its bloody aftermath—the execution of dozens of innocent civilians. His report on this massacre appeared on the front page of The Washington Post. It is also the basis for the opening chapter of his book, Against All Odds.

Next, he flew to Sudan, where he contacted the two loosely allied nationalist movements—the Eritrean Liberation Front and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front—and traveled into guerrilla-held Eritrea with them. Over the next five years, he returned frequently, writing not only for The Washington Post, but for the New York-based Guardian, the BBC, AP, Reuters and more than a dozen other print and broadcast media in Europe and North America—often as the only reporter in the world covering the conflict.

Eritrea has remained the focus of his political life and his writing ever since, though he has also written on the civil war in Sudan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and social and political movements in Nicaragua and the Philippines, among others.

In 1983, after a stint with Oxfam America in Lebanon, Dan founded the Boston-based development agency Grassroots International to provide material aid to social movements in Eritrea and other conflict areas, including Lebanon, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, South Africa and the Philippines, to which he traveled to set up new aid and advocacy programs.

In the ‘90s, he returned to freelancing and set out to write books, starting with his narrative of Eritrea’s liberation, Against All Odds. He financed this by securing grants and consulting for international development and human rights organizations. Prominent among these projects was a multiyear investigation into post-cold war social and political movements in Eritrea, South Africa, Palestine and Nicaragua that resulted in his second book, Rethinking Revolution: New Strategies for Democracy & Social Justice. He also researched the arms trade in Sudan for Human Rights Watch during which he toured rebel-held areas and debriefed defectors from Sudan’s armed forces and from Osama bin Laden’s emerging terrorist network.

After war broke out between Eritrea and Ethiopia in 1998 over their undemarcated border, among other issues, Dan took an assignment with Eritrea’s Ministry of Information to write a semi-official handbook to raise the country’s profile in the international community. However, when former liberation front commander and provisional President Isaias Afwerki suppressed all debate over the conflict and the slow pace of democratization by arresting his former comrades and shutting down the press, Dan became one of the ruling party’s leading critics.

A two-time MacArthur Foundation grantee, he is the author of six books: Against All Odds: A Chronicle of the Eritrean Revolution (1997); Rethinking Revolution: New Strategies for Democracy & Social Justice (2002); Eritrea: A Handbook (2002); a two-volume collection of his Eritrea articles Taking on the Superpowers: 1976-1982 and Building a New Nation: 1984-2002 (2003, 2004); and Conversations with Eritrean Political Prisoners (2004). He is also the editor of The Proceedings of the 20th Anniversary Conference of the National Union of Eritrean Women (2002) and Simmons Women on Women in the New South Africa (2005).

Shortly after 9/11, he founded the Cape Ann Forum in Gloucester, Mass, which he continues to chair. He also sits on the boards of Grassroots International and the Tesfa Delina Foundation and maintains strong ties with Middle East Report whose board he once chaired and for which he is now a contributing editor.

Since 2002, he has been a full-time lecturer in journalism and African politics at Simmons College, Boston. He is now at work on a political novel set in Eritrea, whose working title is Hostage.

Updated September 2005

Download Dan's CV