ABOUT
David Lance
Born in 1971 and raised on Chicago’s South Side, David Lance was that rarest of breed — a die-hard fan of both the White Sox and the Cubs. He grew up dreaming of the outfield at old Comiskey Park and, later, of following in the footsteps of columnist Mike Royko. That second dream got him partway there: as a young man, he worked as an agate clerk at the Chicago Sun-Times, the paper Royko made famous.
From 1992 to 2007, Lance worked as a full-time sports reporter at newspapers across the country, including the Times of Northwest Indiana, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Dayton Daily News, and the Dallas Morning News. He covered nearly every sport imaginable — rodeo, disc golf, dirt-track and big-track auto racing, the NFL, MLB, and more high school games than he can count.
Bored with news reporting, he taught English as a Second Language in Madagascar from 2007 to 2009. He has been a teacher ever since — in the South Bronx, in Chicago, in the Philippines, and in the Alaskan Bush — and currently teaches sixth, seventh, and eighth grade in the Chicago Public Schools.
Lance holds a Master’s in the Teaching of English from Teachers College, Columbia University, earned as a Peace Corps Fellow from 2010 to 2012. He has completed the foundational coursework toward a PhD at DePaul University; the dissertation, he’ll be the first to tell you, remains unwritten. He lives in Chicago’s South Loop.