Dennis J Bernstein is the host and executive producer of Flashpoints, a daily news magazine broadcast on Pacifica Radio. He is an award-winning investigative reporter, essayist and poet. His articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Nation, and many other publications in the US and around the world. He is the recipient of the Art of Peace Award, the International Service Journalism Award from Friends World College, and six Project Censored awards for investigative reporting. In 2009, Pulse Media named him one of the “20 Top Global Media Figures.”

Bernstein is also a widely published poet, and the author, most recently, of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom, which received the 2012 Literary Achievement Award from Artist Embassy International. His poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, Chimaera, Bat City Review, The Progressive, Texas Observer, ZYZZYVA, etc

Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Color Purple , writes that Special Ed “…is art turned to us through the eyes of love.” Carol Smaldino says in The Huffington Post that the poems remind us how “…we are all connected to the sorrows as well as to the grandness of being human…”

Bernstein, who holds a master’s degree in Education, has also taught media literacy and special education, working in some of the poorest communities in New York City and New York State. Bernstein has also taught writing and reading literacy in various prisons in New York City and New York State, for the CCNY/John Jay College and Mercy College.