Peter Catapano

Peter Catapano is an author and editor who has worked at The New York Times since 1998. He is the founding editor of the Times’ philosophy series The Stone, which ran for eleven years, and co-editor of four essay collections. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Frequencies: A Collaborative Genealogy of Spirituality.

Catapano began his career delivering newspapers in his Staten Island neighborhood at age twelve. Before joining The New York Times as a news assistant, he worked as a waiter, bartender, newsroom clerk, middle school science teacher, tutor, and rock drummer. He graduated from Cornell University in 1985 and later studied fiction and poetry at Brooklyn College.

His interests include ambient and experimental music, poetry, improvisation, devotional practice, and the relationship between the natural world and artistic creation. He is currently writing several books—or perhaps one very long one—at a deliberately unhurried pace.