Shelby Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, which won the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Steele's most recent book is White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. He is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Newsweek, and The Washington Post. For his work on the PBS television documentary Seven Days in Bensonhurst, he was recognized with both an Emmy Award and a Writers Guild Award. In 2004, President George W. Bush, citing Steele's "learned examinations of race relations and cultural issues, "honored him with the National Humanities Medal. He lives in California.