Darcy Frey

Darcy Frey is an American writer from New York. Best known for his 1994 book The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams, Frey has published articles in The American Lawyer, Rolling Stone, Harper's, and The New York Times Magazine. He is a contributing editor at Harper's and The New York Times Magazine and the winner of a National Magazine Award and the Livingston Award. Both awards were for "The Last Shot," a 1993 article published in Harper's that Frey developed into his first book. The article was included in The Best American Essays 1994. Frey graduated from Oberlin College in 1983.

In 2007 The Last Shot was selected by the Durham County Library in North Carolina as the title for Durham Reads Together (DRT) program, a community wide initiative to read and discuss relevant issues from the book.

Frey refers to his writing as "creative non-fiction". Meticulous research and crisp prose bolster the cornerstone of his work: his eye for intriguing, sometimes obscure, subjects. For example, he observed Long Island air traffic controllers for five months to write "Something's Got to Give", a piece published in The New York Times Magazine. The article inspired the film Pushing Tin. Frey has also written about environmental topics, such as global warming. He profiled George Divoky, a research scientist in the Arctic, for The New York Times Magazine in 2002. The breadth of his subject matter is intentional; he enjoys freelancing. "The only way to be a writer is to be a self-employed writer," said Frey, who quit a permanent position at Harper's after only a year.