Doug Merlino is an American writer and journalist.
Personal history
Merlino grew up in Seattle, Washington and attended the Lakeside School. He studied government at Claremont McKenna College in Los Angeles, and received graduate degrees in journalism and international affairs from the University of California, Berkeley. He lived in Budapest, Hungary, where he worked as an editor at the Budapest Business Journal. He is married and now lives in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City.

Professional work
Merlino has worked for publications including Slate, Wired, Men's Journal, the Budapest Business Journal, and the Seattle Times. He reported on post-genocide reconciliation in Rwanda for the PBS show Frontline/World.

Merlino's first book, The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White, was published by Bloomsbury USA in January 2011. The nonfiction book tells the story of a basketball team that Merlino played on as a 14-year-old in the 1986. The team, an integration experiment, mixed privileged white players from Merlino's private school with African-American kids from Seattle's Central Area. The boys won an AAU championship that season, and the organizers began a program to enroll some of the black players in private schools.

Several years later Merlino learned that Tyrell Johnson, one of his African-American teammates, had been murdered and dismembered. This spurred him to track down the remaining players to find out what happened to them, and how they looked back at their team. They include a hedge fund manager, a Pentecostal preacher, a prosecutor, a frequently incarcerated cocaine addict, a winemaker, and a street hustler. The resulting book tells the story of these individuals, but also focuses on the shifting dynamics of race and class, manhood, education and gentrification over the last thirty years. Many of the players and coaches from the team reunited in January 2011 for a televised panel discussion that coincided with the release of the book.

Awards
Merlino received the 2011 Washington State Book Award in Biography/Memoir for The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White.