Len Strazewski, a Columbia College professor emeritus and comic book writer known for his work on “The Flash,” died Monday, April 27, at 71.

Strazewski died peacefully in an Evanston nursing home following months of infections and hospital stays, Kevin O’Reilly, the son of his longtime partner, shared in a Facebook post.

Strazewski spent more than two decades at Columbia where he became a defining figure in the journalism program as a professor, mentor and administrator. He also built a career in comics, writing for DC and contributing to titles including “The Flash,” “Starman” and “Justice Society of America.”

He was a former faculty advisor to the Columbia Chronicle and served as interim chair of the former Journalism Department, as well as interim associate provost for the college. Strazewski was named professor emeritus in 2022 after his retirement from Columbia in 2019.

“Len brought not only his experience as a journalist and his passion for the craft, but also his irreverence to his teaching and to faculty meetings,” said former journalism professor Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin, now program manager for training and curriculum at the Solutions Journalism Network. “Even though he took his work very seriously, he didn’t take things too seriously — he had things in perspective. I learned a lot from him when I was a new professor, and I carried many of those things with me long after he retired.”

Bloyd-Peshkin said Strazewski was a practical person. “He wanted students to learn useful, real-world skills because he cared about their future careers,” she said.

In his own journalism career, Strazewski was a contributing news writer for the American Medical Association and wrote about health care, employee benefits and insurance for more than 30 years. His last byline for AMA was in November 2025. 

“He was so tough on us to make sure our writing was strong and succinct,” said Molly Walsh, a Columbia alum and editor-in-chief of the Chronicle in the summer of 2019. “I always felt beat up when I had a million of edits from Len, but that’s because his opinion mattered to me, and all of those edits showed how much he cared.”

Walsh, now a reporter for The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com, said that getting a compliment from Strazewski “felt like a Pulitzer.”

“Learning from him was the best,” Walsh said. “He had this mix of patience and toughness that made you better without ever making you feel small. He’d let you chase a story, even if it wasn’t perfect yet, but he wasn’t going to let you turn in something half-baked. You always knew he had your back. The second a difficult phone call was coming up, he would be ready to jump on the call too to stand up for me.”

Zoë Eitel, a Columbia alum who served as editor-in-chief during the 2017–18 academic year, described Strazewski as a “very opinionated” person.

“He had a lot of experience, and he wanted you to do things the right way. The best example, or comparison I can give, is that he was very Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada,” said Eitel, now the assistant director of operations and outreach at the DePaul University Career Center. “He was sometimes hard to understand, just because he was an old grump, but if you figured out how to talk to him, he was a hoot to be around.”

Eitel still remembered his hatred for passive voice or for the term “reach out.”

“If I said I was going to reach out to somebody for an interview, he’d be like, ‘Oh, are you gonna reach your hand out to them? Are you gonna do that?’” Eitel said. “That’s something I think about all the time, like, nope, don’t say that. Len hates that.”

Outside the newsroom and classroom, Strazewski wrote for DC Comics and was part of projects spanning dozens of titles.

In 2013, he told Chicago Talks that he estimated he had written between 160 and 200 comics. Part of his work was on display at Columbia’s campus at the time.

He said he got into journalism because of Superman. “The job of reporter and journalist seemed to be a suitable profession for a young man because Clark Kent did it,” he said.

Strazewski had a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University, a master’s degree from Loyola University Chicago and a master’s degree from the University of Illinois Chicago.

For Walsh, what stuck with her the most about Strazewski was “how much he believed in student journalists.”

“He always expected you to rise to the moment because he knew you could,” she said. “There are going to be a lot of journalists out there who carry pieces of how he taught, how he edited and how he showed up. “

O’Reilly said funeral arrangements were pending.

Additional reporting from Kate Julianne Larroder.

Copy edited by Katie Peters