Location: In Person at the FBI Portland Office
To attend, please RSVP via email to Bella Crepeaux, FBI Portland Outreach [hidden email]
Guests are welcome and must go through a security check. If you are planning to bring a guest please email Bella Crepeaux their full name, date of birth and driver's license number.
*** A Reminder ***
Please plan to arrive a few minutes early to get through security. Note that the guards will not permit weapons of any kind, including knives, to enter our secure facility.
Likewise, security policy prohibits possession or use of any kind of recording device, including cameras, cell phones, tablets/laptops, Fit Bits, iPhone Watches and any device that has wireless or Bluetooth functions.
The items just mentioned will not be allowed in the building,so please store them accordingly prior to your arrival.
Veteran author and journalist Bryan Denson specializes in telling true stories cinematically. He's happiest when the story plays hard to get, requiring long hours of investigative lock picking. He immerses himself in the lives of his subjects, much like a method actor going deep into character, to reveal the souls of their stories.
Bryan's 33-year career at five daily newspapers, most recently The Oregonian/OregonLive and The Houston Post, helped uncover scandal in the government’s biggest work program for disabled Americans; pressured the U.S. Air Force to rewrite deadly flight manual instructions for its primary transport plane; and exposed wasteful and duplicative efforts to clone monkeys at a national primate lab. His stories also laid bare Social Security’s glacial process of awarding disability benefits to those who desperately need them while wasting billions on those who don’t. Bryan’s award-winning series, “The Slaying of a Generation,” chronicled a 300 percent increase in the gunfire deaths of Houston's Black teens in the early 1990s.
His work has explained how an FBI agent's myopic supervision of a multiple-murder investigation inadvertently caused the rape of a teen-age girl, and how a small-town police department wrote $1 million in speeding tickets in just six months on a patch of highway outside its jurisdiction. And his series "Death Without Decorum" uncovered horrifying abuses by funeral home operators across the Lone Star State. Bryan's award-winning narrative “Grave Injustice” explored the global black market for Native American antiquities through the prism of Jack Lee Harelson, the most prolific looter and grave robber in the American West. Harelson’s crimes – including the attempted murder-for-hire of a business partner, two judges, and the cop who brought him to justice – was the subject of a truTV special: “Grave Robber.”
The Spy’s Son takes readers deep into life inside a CIA family, a federal prison, and into the colorful world of spies and spy catchers on four continents. The book was first released by The Atlantic Monthly Press on May 5, 2015, and is now for sale in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, The Netherlands, Estonia, Japan, and soon in Russia. Film rights were later purchased by Paramount Pictures, then Cross Creek Pictures.
Bryan has completed all three books in his new FBI Files series for younger readers (Macmillan/Roaring Brook Press). The first , Unabomber: Agent Kathy Puckett and the Hunt for a Serial Bomber, was published in June 2019. Book two, Catching a Russian Spy: Agent Leslie G. Wiser Jr. and the Case of Aldrich Ames, was published in January 2020. Book three, Uncovering a Terrorist: Agent Ryan Dwyer and the Case of the Portland Bomb Plot, was published in June 2020. Those books, along with The Spy’s Son, are on loan at nearly 2,000 libraries in five languages.
During his long career, Bryan has been awarded scores of national and regional journalism honors. He is a winner of the George Polk Award and the Michael E. DeBakey Journalism Award, and was a finalist for The Pulitzer Prize in national reporting. Bryan also was a finalist for the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, a second-place finisher in The Society for Features Journalism for news series and projects, and an honorable mention for the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. The Spy's Son, Bryan's first book, was a finalist for the William E. Colby Award.
He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he now contributes stories to Newsweek and ProPublica and serves as a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. His stories have also appeared in Maxim, Reader's Digest, All About Beer, Nieman Reports, IRE Journal, Running Times, and on the websites of Rolling Stone and Mother Jones.