Journalist and author Alex Kotlowitz on empathy, violence and the fight against hopelessness in Chicago

CHICAGO - Alex Kotlowitz sat at the head of the room, a hand on his broad forehead, another holding a pen poised over a student paper. Around him sat the 19 undergraduates at Northwestern University who had registered for his class, "The Journalism of Empathy." He's been teaching this at the Medill School of Journalism for about two decades. He's not a jokey sort of instructor; he's not a professor who indulges long digressions or small talk about what everyone did last weekend. He takes his seat, and the class takes theirs, silently.

Empathy, he said, "is the centrifugal force of storytelling."

Empathy, he said, "is the centrifugal force of communities."

Heads lowered and pens scratched. Each session lasts three hours, and on this afternoon, the class read from their latest assignment, then discussed the work of established journalists, but it was the select sprinkles of veteran-journalistic wisdom, tossed out here and there by Kotlowitz, that riveted: Knowing history is key ("You want to come from a place of confidence and knowledge"); being objective doesn't mean not having an opinion; and remember to give agency to people ("Writing about pure victims is tough").

Scribble, scribble.

Later at his home in Oak Park, Ill., Kotlowitz said empathy may be the only thing he can teach. But even then, empathy demands self-awareness, imagination. Irony, he said, in comparison, is harder for him. Which will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed Kotlowitz's work for 40 years, and his plaintive, heartbreaking tales of violence and urban poverty, including the 1991 classic, "There Are No Children Here," about two Chicago brothers