Dave Cullen – Author Biography
Dave Cullen is an American journalist and author best known for Columbine, the definitive account of the 1999 school shooting that won the Edgar Award and spent years on bestseller lists. His meticulous, compassionate reporting set a new standard for writing about tragedy — and for refusing to glorify its perpetrators.
Early Life
Dave Cullen grew up in the Chicago area. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master’s in creative writing from the University of Colorado Boulder. He moved to Colorado in 1994 and has lived in the Denver area ever since.
Career
Cullen was among the first journalists on the scene at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, and he spent the next decade investigating what really happened — debunking the myths (the killers were not bullied outcasts; they were not targeting jocks or Christians) that had hardened into conventional wisdom. Columbine was published in 2009 to extraordinary acclaim: a New York Times bestseller, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime, and named one of the decade’s best books by multiple outlets. He applied the same approach to the Parkland shooting in Parkland: Birth of a Movement (2019), focusing on the student activists rather than the shooter. His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Slate, and Salon.
Major Works
Cullen’s defining books are Columbine (2009) and Parkland: Birth of a Movement (2019).
Writing Style and Themes
Cullen writes true crime as moral investigation. His great principle — developed through Columbine and now influential across journalism — is to deny shooters the notoriety they seek: he minimizes their names and biographies while centering victims, survivors, and the systemic failures that enabled the violence. His reporting is exhaustive and his prose is controlled, letting facts accumulate into devastating effect. His work explores how communities grieve, how myths form around trauma, and how media coverage itself can become part of the pathology of mass shootings.
Legacy
Columbine is widely considered the definitive book on its subject and a model of responsible true-crime writing. Cullen’s “no notoriety” protocol has been adopted by law enforcement agencies and media outlets covering mass shootings. He proved that the hardest stories — the ones the public most needs to understand correctly — demand the most patience, and that getting it right matters more than getting it first.
