Gary Mason Pomerantz was born in N. Tarrytown, N.Y. on November 17, 1960. The youngest of three boys, he spent his childhood in New York, Florida and southern California.

After graduation from the University of California-Berkeley in 1982 with a bachelor’s degree in History, Pomerantz worked as a sports reporter for The Washington Post for six years, covering the Washington Redskins, Georgetown University basketball and the National Football League. He then moved to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (1988-1999) where he wrote profiles, special projects, columns and as a member of the newspaper's editorial board.

He left daily journalism in 1999 and served for two years as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at Emory University in Atlanta where he taught courses on reporting, and the history of the American press.

Today he is a visiting lecturer in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, teaching specialized reporting and writing.

Pomerantz has written four non-fiction books, including his newest, The Devil’s Tickets (Crown, June 2009), a thriller set in a bygone age when the card game of bridge was all the rage. The Devil's Tickets evokes the last echoes of the Roaring 20’s and the darkness of the Depression when a spotlessly-manicured, tuxedoed Russian named Ely Culbertson became the Barnum of a bridge craze that fueled marital uproar across the nation, including a husband-killing and sensational trial in Boss Pendergast's Kansas City. 

Pomerantz’s first book, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, (Scribner, 1996), a multi-generational saga about Atlanta and its racial conscience, was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and a finalist for Non-Fiction Book of the Year by the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tenn. The Georgia Center for the Book in May 2005, in an attempt to enhance public appreciation of Georgia's rich literary tradition, selected Peachtree among 25 books that "All Georgians Should Read," along with works by Pat Conroy, Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor.

His second book, Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds (Crown, 2001), chronicled the lives of 29 people aboard an ill-fated commuter flight in 1995. It was described by Kirkus Reviews in a starred review as "a heart in your throat story . . . Spellbinding," and has been published to acclaim in Germany, Britain and China.

In WILT, 1962 (Crown, 2005), Pomerantz recreates the legendary night when basketball’s Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game against the New York Knicks in Hershey, Pa. Named an Editors’ Choice book by The New York Times, WILT, 1962 was called by Entertainment Weekly “a meticulous and engaging narrative – a slam dunk of a read.” WILT, 1962 recently was optioned for film.

Pomerantz has coached youth sports for the past fifteen years and serves today as a steering committee member for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Marin.  He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and their three children.