Dale Maharidge is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He taught at Stanford University for ten years. He was a 1988 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. His books include The Coming White Minority: California, Multiculturalism and America's Future (Vintage, 1999). His work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times and the Times Magazine, the Washington Post, Mother Jones, and other publications.

For over twenty years, Maharidge has collaborated with photographer Michael Williamson (also a Katrina Media Fellow) on books documenting America's poor and dispossessed. They were awarded the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for And Their Children After Them/The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South (Pantheon, 1989).

Their first book was Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass (Dial/Doubleday, 1985). For several years, they traveled the nation by freight train and in an old car, living with and documenting job-seeking Rust Bowl refugees. In 1995, Bruce Springsteen was inspired by Journey to Nowhere to write two songs on his Ghost of Tom Joad album, "Youngstown" and "New Timer." Springsteen wrote an introduction to the book's 1996 reissue.

The two men also have published the following:

The Last Great American Hobo (Prima, 1993), which chronicles the last Depression-era hobo who is thrust into modern times and takes a final stand in the face of the police sweeps of the contemporary homeless.

Homeland (Seven Stories Press, 2004), about fear and nationalism in post-9/11 America.

Denison, Iowa: Searching for the Soul of America Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town (Free Press, 2005), about a small Iowa town that is one-third Latino.

For ten years while working at the Sacramento Bee, Maharidge and Williamson teamed up on numerous projects on race, class, and life in America. In addition, they collaborated on stories that appeared in Rolling Stone and George magazine.