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David Peduto

David Peduto is a writer, paddleboarder, and a former improv comedian - despite not being particularly funny. His memoir, 9/11 Years Old: An American Adolescence, is a coming-of-age story in the era of terror.

An Arabic speaker, he is an alum of Middlebury College and The Fletcher School at Tufts University. He worked for a dozen years at Recorded Future, the world’s largest threat intelligence company, which was acquired by Mastercard in 2024. Before that, he was with a crisis response company, helping to establish its first overseas offices in both Pakistan and Thailand.

David has been published in The Economist. He lives with his wife and children in Maryland.

9/11 Years Old: An American Adolescence is a coming-of-age story in the era of terror. It hinges on a single question: What if our expectations about “the other” are founded on the exceptions? 

Just a kid when the September 11 terrorist attacks happened, David Peduto set a course to join the CIA. Determined to serve his country, he learned Arabic, studied abroad in Egypt, and was on the cusp of fulfilling his childhood dream — only to realize that being a spy would be anathema to the man he had become. Deciding against this ready-made career, David found work for a crisis response company in Pakistan, his ultimate proving ground. He went there a year after the bin Laden raid — and he went without a gun.

From New York to Abbottabad, from Yosemite to Mount Sinai, 9/11 Years Old takes the reader on a transformative journey by challenging prejudice through personal experience. A white Catholic from Rhode Island, David’s active engagement with Arabic, Islam, and the Middle East enabled reality to supplant stereotypes about a foreign language, religion, and region that had been synonymous with terrorism in post-9/11 America. 9/11 Years Old shares an adventure that serves as a call for us - as individuals and as a country — to more fully live out the American and Judeo-Christian ideals we otherwise so loudly promote.

With the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks next year, 9/11 Years Old is a timely memoir that will encourage a generation of readers to engage with its legacy while educating a new generation coming of age in a world shaped by it.

Now seeking agent representation.