Calvin Marshall Trillin (born 5 December 1935) is an American journalist, humorist, food writer, poet, memoirist and novelist. He is a winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor (2012) and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008). Early life and education Calvin Trillin was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1935 to Edythe and Abe Trillin. In his book Messages from My Father, he said his parents called him "Buddy". Raised Jewish, he attended public schools in Kansas City, graduated from Southwest High School, and went on to Yale University, where he was the roommate and friend of Peter M. Wolf (for whose 2013 memoir, My New Orleans, Gone Away, he wrote a humorous foreword), and where he served as chairman of the Yale Daily News and was a member of the Pundits and Scroll and Key before graduating in 1957; he later served as a Fellow of the University. Career After serving in the U.S. Army, Trillin worked as a reporter for Time magazine, then joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1963. He wrote the magazine's U.S. Journal series from 1967 to 1982, covering local events both serious and quirky throughout the United States. His reporting for the magazine on the racial integration of the University of Georgia was published in his first book, An Education in Georgia (1964). From 1975 to 1987, Trillin contributed articles to Moment Magazine, an independent magazine which focuses on the life of the American Jewish community. Trillin has also written for The Nation magazine. He began in 1978 with a column called Variations, which was eventually renamed Uncivil Liberties; it ran through 1985. The same name – Uncivil Liberties – was used for the column when it was syndicated weekly in newspapers, from 1986 to 1995, and essentially the same column ran (without a name) in Time magazine from 1996 to 2001. His humor columns for The Nation often made fun of the editor of the time, Victor Navasky, whom he jokingly referred to as the wily and parsimonious Navasky. (He once wrote that the magazine paid "in the high two figures.") From the July 2, 1990, issue of The Nation to today, Trillin has written his weekly "Deadline Poet" column – humorous poems about current events. Trillin has written considerably more pieces than any other person for The Nation. Family, travel and food are