About Curtis Seltzer
Curtis Seltzer has lived and worked in Appalachia for the better part of 55 years. He graduated from Pittsburgh's Peabody High School in 1963 where his classmates voted him second funniest, which he continues to think he is. He has a B.A. from Oberlin College, and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in international relations and American government.
He was briefly enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the school of education of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in the early 1970s, because he wanted to learn how to teach. If the secret was there, he did not find it. He left after intentionally flunking a course called, “Survival Techniques in the Educational Bureaucracy.” The course ignored survival techniques in favor of championing “alternative” schools. Both he and his UMASS professor did not survive their bureaucracies.
Fiction: The Becker Trilogy—The Point of the Pick, Squeezing the Flats and The Past Rises—is a five-decade-long love story of three people caught in the grip of Mafia vengeance and vigilante hatreds. It would make a good television mini-series.
Non-Fiction: Curtis wrote Fire in the Hole: Miners and Managers in the American Coal Industry (University Press of Kentucky, 1985) and several book-length reports for federal agencies. He produced a newspaper column for several years that won awards from the Virginia Press Association. He has written for The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Monthly, Nation, Equus, Le Monde, Financial Times and other publications.
For twelve years beginning in 2007, Curtis wrote a weekly column, “Country Real Estate” that was self-syndicated to more than 1,700 outlets and contacts. These columns are collected in Land Matters, Blue Grass Notes, Snowy Mountain Breakdown, Spinal Chords From the Devil’s Backbone and Maple-Leaf Rags. Several columns became commentaries on WVTF, Virginia public radio. He also wrote advice columns for “LandThink.com” and other real-estate publications.
Arbitration: Curtis has served as an arbitrator with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service since 1985. He has also worked as an arbitrator/mediator with the American Arbitration Association and other providers. He continues to hear cases through FMCS.
Land Consulting: Curtis has helped clients find and buy timberland (both pine and hardwoods), farms, development land and conservation property since the late 1990s. He facilitated the purchase of 5,000 acres in eastern North Carolina that is red wolf habitat and 3,100 acres in the Adirondack Park that was owned by Mutt Lange and Shania Twain. He’s worked with properties ranging from 600,000 acres in Canada to 3,000 acres in Hawaii, from 30 acres in West Tennessee to 55,000 acres in Georgia.
As a land consultant, he’s drawn on skills he’s used in other work. Experience in question-asking and problem-solving gained as a journalist and arbitrator transfers directly into knowing how to scope property. Researching a land deal is similar to digging out a news story. He writes summary memos for clients that explore a property’s benefits, risks, costs and unknowns.
He bought his first land in 1971, 60 acres of recently timbered woods in Wendell Depot, north of Amherst, Ma. Subsequently, he’s owned property in about a dozen states and has scoped property in more than a dozen others.
Farming: Since 1983, he’s operated a cattle-and-hardwood-timber farm in Blue Grass, Virginia, where he can see the crests of both Devil's Backbone and Snowy Mountain. He estimates he has added about 740,000 pounds of grass gain on stocker steers over 41 years using rotational grazing.
Personal: His wife, Melissa Ann Dowd, is one of two lawyers in Highland County. She recently retired from serving as the elected Commonwealth’s Attorney for sixteen years. She has been counsel to the county’s board of supervisors for more than 30 years and has a part-time private practice. She grew up in Charlotte where her family was involved in the newspaper and printing businesses.
Their daughter, Molly, graduated first in her class with a Masters in Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University after graduating from the University of Virginia. She has worked for Bloomberg News, JP Morgan Chase and Google. She currently works for Genentech. She published her first book in 2011 at www.mollyseltzer.com.
View my resume here: Curtis Seltzer.
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