Chris Floyd

Chris Floyd (1958, Watertown, Tennessee, United States) is an American journalist and author best known for his blog of political news and commentary, Empire Burlesque. Floyd's writing has also appeared in CounterPunch, the The Ecologist, Anderson Valley Advertiser, The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review, The Christian Science Monitor, the Baltimore Chronicle, the Bergen Record, and Truthout.org, among other publications. His November 2002 story, "Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism," was chosen as one of Project Censored's "Top 25 Stories of 2002/2003."
Floyd's work has also been anthologized in Media Democracy in Action: Censored 2004, and the I Hate Republicans Reader. A selection of articles from his blog were published as a collection, Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, 2001-2005.
Floyd was born and raised in Wilson County, Tennessee. The controversy surrounding the expulsion of dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union in the early 1970s led Floyd to an interest in Russian literature, and he received a B.A. in Russian from the University of Tennessee. He later studied journalism and religious studies at the graduate level at Tennessee, but did not complete a higher degree.
Floyd's journalism career began in Tennessee and southern Mississippi working for local newspapers, covering crime, courts and politics. In 1984, he began working as a writer/editor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He then annotated Shakespeare, 19th century British poetry, and American literature for a start-up company producing multi-media CD editions of literary works for colleges and schools. . During this time, he also taught Russian literature for a year year at the University of Tennessee.
From 1994 to 1996, Floyd spent two years in Moscow, where he worked for The Moscow Times, an English-language daily, and one of the first independent newspapers of the post-Soviet era. He served in several positions at the paper, including film critic from 1996 to 2000. From 1995 to 2005, Floyd contributed the "Global Eye" column to the Moscow Times and the St. Petersburg Times.

From 1998 to 2000, Floyd was the editor of Science & Spirit, an Oxford-based quarterly journal dealing with the contentious relationship between religion and science. His work there included interviews with such prominent thinkers as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Frans de Waal, V.S. Ramachandran, Freeman Dyson, Paul Davies, Lisa Jardine, A.N. Wilson, and John Polkinghorne.
Since 2000, Floyd has worked as a freelance journalist and as a writer and researcher for Oxford University. He is also Editor at Large for Atlantic Free Press, and has worked closely with publisher Richard Kastelein on a number of publishing projects since 2005.
In 2005, Floyd released an album of his songs, Wheel of Heaven, recorded in collaboration with producer/musician Nick Kulukundis.
Floyd has been married twice and has four children.

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