Geoffrey C. Ward

Born 1940-11-30 · Newark, Ohio

Geoffrey C. Ward is an author, editor, historian and writer of scripts for American History Documentaries for Public Television. He is the author or co-author of 18 books. Five books are companion books to documentary films that he has written. He has won seven Emmy Awards. The principal writer of the television mini-series The Civil War (1990,) Ward has collaborated with its co-producer Ken Burns on many of the documentaries he has made since, including Jazz, Baseball, The War and Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. This work has garnered him five Emmy Awards. He also won two Emmys for the American Experience series, including The Kennedys, in 1992 and TR,The Story of Theodore Roosevelt in 1996. His script for the documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, won the Writers Guild of America Award in 2005[3] and the accompanying book won the 2006 William Hill Sports Book of the Year and the Anisfield-Wolf Award for best biography. In 2006, the Organization of American Historians gave Ward their Friend of History Award for his outstanding contributions to American history: "Over the last twenty years Geoffrey Ward's writings on American History have had a greater influence and reached a wider audience than those of any other American writer and historian. [His] work is always his own, but he has also helped free ideas that otherwise might have been imprisoned in the academy and helped them find a wider world. He has helped academic historians understand the possibilities, limits, and demands of what has become the medium through which most Americans now get their history." The most recent Burns/Ward collaboration, Prohibition (2011), brought Ward his seventh Emmy for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming. He is currently at work on a multi-part series "Vietnam", with Lynn Novick and Ken Burns. He is the principle writer or co-writer of 24 documentary films. Ward is married to the writer and social/environmental activist Diane Raines Ward. He has three children.