David Simon

David Simon is a journalist, author, and television writer/producer best known as the creator and show runner of HBO series The Wire and Treme. He spent twelve years on the crime beat for the Baltimore Sun. He also worked on the adaptations of his books Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood for NBC and HBO respectively.

Born in Washington, he came to Baltimore in 1983 to work as a crime reporter at the Baltimore Sun. While at the paper, he reported and wrote two works of narrative non-fiction, Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, the former an account of a year spent with the city homicide squad and the latter, a year spent on a West Baltimore drug corner.

Homicide became the basis for the NBC drama which aired from 1993 to 1999 and for which Simon worked as a writer and producer after leaving the Sun in 1995. The Corner became an HBO miniseries and won three Emmy Awards in 2000. The Wire, a subsequent HBO drama, aired from 2002 to 2008 and depicted a dystrophic American city contending with a fraudulent drug war, the loss of its industrial base, political and educational systems incapable of reform and a media culture oblivious to all of the above.

Simon served as a writer and executive producer of HBO’s Generation Kill, a miniseries depicting U.S. Marines in the early days of the Iraq conflict. Simon also co-created the HBO series Treme. Simon also does prose work for The New Yorker, Esquire and the Washington Post, among other publications.