Visiting Writer: Daniel D’Addario ’06

On January 22, students and community members gathered for the Gordon McKinley Fridays at Westminster series, and welcomed alumnus Daniel D’Addario ’06, Variety’s chief correspondent and debut author.

The program began with Michael Cervas P’96, ’01, ’10 presenting student reader Marco Zheng ’27, who read his poems “I Don’t Know” and “Between Shore and Sky” and a short prose piece titled “The Night Here Does Not Make a Sound.” Cervas then introduced D’Addario and shared, “I was lucky enough to teach Mr. D’Addario several times. I knew immediately, even when he was a Third Former, that he had a bright future as a writer.”

D’Addario is a graduate of Columbia University and began his career writing for magazines, including Time and Variety, and has won awards from the Los Angeles Press Club for profile writing and political commentary. As chief correspondent, D’Addario explained, “I write criticism, columns, features and interviews for our weekly print magazine Variety, as well as for online. A great deal of what I do focuses on writing profiles and interviews of actors and directors, as well as commentary about my perspective on how film and TV reflect back the world in which we live.”

Before reading from his Variety profile of “Wicked” stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, D’Addario said, “The goal for any magazine writing is to stand out from the pack and to write stories that don’t feel generic. I want my work to feel as if no one else could have written it, whether one of my peer journalists or an AI interface. In interviewing, that means working to find a new angle on people who’ve already been covered aggressively.”

D’Addario also read from a personal essay he wrote for Variety about trying to engage his then three-year-old daughter in his beloved ritual of going to the movies, and then shared an excerpt from his first novel, “The Talent,” which was published last February. “I think that unlike a lot of novelists who’ve probably read for you all, I see fiction writing as a form of journalism,” said D’Addario. “I know that may sound counterintuitive or perverse, but if you’re writing a novel, at least in my view, you have to convey to the reader what it’s like within the mind of another person. It’s just that this person is fictional. Then you have to draw a world around them that feels rich with detail and insight.”

The following day, D’Addario spent time with students in English classes as part of the Visiting Writers Program.