ROCKPORT — If you don’t know who he is, you should.
Colin Woodard is becoming one of Maine’s preeminent thinkers, writers and journalists. The topics he tackles spring from a Maine sensibility, but his work is not bound here.
His books include “The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier,” a cultural and environmental history of coastal Maine; “Ocean’s End: Travels Through Endangered Seas”; “The Republic of Pirates: Being The True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates And The Man Who Brought Them Down,” on which an upcoming NBC series will be based; and “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America,” which was named one of the best books of 2011 by the editors of The New Republic.
Woodard, 44, is a Maine native who now lives in Freeport with his wife and child. A year ago, he began working for the Portland Press Herald as state and national affairs writer. A series looking at private, on-line only schools for the Press Herald earned him the prestigious George Polk Award.
He also writes for Washington Monthly, the Christian Science Monitor and The Chronicle of Higher Education and has reported from more than 50 countries and lived for more than four years in Eastern Europe.
And Woodard wrote a column for The Working Waterfront from 2003 to 2012.