John DeDakis
TV writer with a flair for mystery

Speaker, Saturday, Oct. 4, Edgerton Public Library community room
"From Journalist to Novelist (Or How I Learned to Stop Telling the Truth and Start Making it Up)"

A native of La Crosse, Wisconsin, DeDakis is the author of the recent mystery thriller, “Fast Track.” He works as a writer and copy editor for the Emmy Award-winning “The Situation Room,” a CNN news show anchored by Wolf Blitzer. “Fast Track” is set in a place very much like Stoughton, Wisconsin. In this small Wisconsin community, a woman searches for her life’s purpose while busily engaged in sorting out the circumstances of a car-train collision that left her an orphan as a child. DeDakis’ next book, “Bluff,” will be about a four-day, 25-mile hike along Peru’s Inca Trail near Machu Picchu. The writer began his journalism career in 1969, getting tear-gassed while covering an anti-war demonstration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the campus radio station. He earned a bachelors of arts degree from the UW in 1977, following a 1972-74 U.S. Army stint during which he served as a special events reporter at the American Forces Network-Europe, then located in Frankfurt, Germany. DeDakis, who worked 1983 to 1988 as a reporter with the Christian Broadcasting Network News, has interviewed such celebrities as Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and film director Alfred Hitchcock. He joined the CNN staff in 1988, working 2001 to 2005 as the writing supervisor of CNN’s “Daybreak” show. From 1976 to 1983, he was a reporter with the Madison, Wisconsin, NBC affiliate, WMTV. DeDakis is a member of the Mystery Writers of America. He and his wife, Carol, who live in both Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, are the parents of three grown children.

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