Greg Guma — author, editor, educator, administrator, bookstore owner, historian, and former CEO of the Pacifica Radio network. In the 1970s and 80s he worked with Bernie Sanders and wrote The People's Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution (1989), considered t...
More
Greg Guma — author, editor, educator, administrator, bookstore owner, historian, and former CEO of the Pacifica Radio network. In the 1970s and 80s he worked with Bernie Sanders and wrote The People's Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution (1989), considered the best book on Sanders’ pre-Congress career. He has also written two novels: Spirits of Desire (2004), currently being adapted for the screen, and Dons of Time (2013). He has a B.S. from Syracuse University and an M.Ed. from the University of Vermont.
Greg's other books include Restless Spirits & Popular Movements: A Vermont History (2021), Bread & Puppet: Stories of Struggle and Faith (1985), Passport to Freedom (1992, with Garry Davis), Uneasy Empire: Repression, Globalization and What We Can Do (2002), Big Lies (2011), Progressive Eclipse (2012), Fake News: Journalism in the Age of Deceptions (2018), Into the Mystic and Prisoners of the Real (2023), and Managing Chaos (2024). He also wrote the 2003 play Inquisitions (and Other Un-American Activities), and scripts for documentaries on Haiti, Guatemala, Vermont and Vietnam.
Greg’s career began in Bennington with work as a daily newspaper reporter and photographer in the late 1960s. There he investigated a supermarket credit scheme and shocked local government into adopting housing codes. In 1978 he exposed an FBI disinformation campaign orchestrated to stoke a terrorist scare. Two years later, he broke the news that Bureau agents posed as US Census workers, prompting a congressional inquiry.
He became interested in decentralist thinking during his graduate studies in education, worked closely with anarchist thinker Murray Bookchin, and helped draft the statement of principles for the Decentralists League of Vermont. He taught at Burlington College and Champlain College, launched one of the city's first used bookstores, and edited The Vermont Vanguard Press, a groundbreaking alternative weekly. In the 1980s he ran for the City Council in Burlington, chaired committees to improve government operations and set environmental goals, and launched Maverick Bookstore and Gallery.
In the 1990s Greg led a legal service for immigrants in Albuquerque, New Mexico and managed book business in Santa Monica, California. He returned to Vermont in 1997, producing a weekly column for The Vermont Times, and features for Seven Days and others. He also edited the award-winning Toward Freedom, and organized one of the first Independent Media conferences. In 2004 he co-founded Vermont Guardian, a statewide newspaper, and was asked to lead Pacifica radio two years later. In 2015, he ran for mayor of Burlington.
Less
