Barry Piatt grew up on a small-town farm in Iowa. He has worked in Iowa as a political reporter. When he was just 15, he covered the troubled 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and surrounding protests. He attended college at the University of Northern Iowa and Iowa State University before graduating from George Washington University in Washington, DC. Piatt worked for more than thirty-five years as Communications Director for members of the U.S. House and Senate, as well as for the U.S. Senate Democratic Policy Committee. He also served as a senior aide in two Democratic presidential campaigns and the Communications Director for the Iowa Democratic Party during the 1984 presidential precinct caucuses. He is currently a lecturer at George Washington University and the host of the podcast Barry Piatts’s Political Goose Chase.