SAM SKOLNIK

Old friends from college joke that I used to spend more time with The Washington Post every morning than I ever did with my studies.

So I suppose it’s fitting that my first job in the business was as a news aide for the Post. I wrote my first newspaper stories there as an occasional freelancer for the paper’s Metro section.

After that, I worked for two weekly papers in D.C., Washington Jewish Week and Legal Times, where I covered the Justice Department among other beats. In 2000, I jumped to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where I wrote about everything from terrorism and murder trials to the outbreak of mad cow disease in central Washington state. From there, I moved to the Las Vegas Sun, where I covered the local and federal courts as well as city hall during the reign of former mayor Oscar Goodman.

During my time at the Sun, I was awarded a Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan, from 2007-08.

All in all, I’ve been a journalist for more than two decades. I’ve won a dozen regional and national reporting awards.

After a decade out West, I’m delighted to be back in the Washington, D.C. area.

High Stakes is my first book.