An award-winning investigative reporter who covers civil rights and racial injustice issues will speak at UT on September 6.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, will speak at 6 p.m. in the Sandra G. Powell Recital Hall of the Natalie L. Haslam Music Center. Her talk is entitled “Understanding Modern Day Segregation.”
Sponsored by UT College of Social Work and its Social Justice Innovation Initiative, the event is free and open to the public.
Hannah-Jones was one of 24 people worldwide chosen for the 2017 MacArthur Foundation Genius grant for “chronicling the persistence of racial segregation in American society, particularly in education, and reshaping national conversations around education reform.”
She received a National Magazine Award for a first-person story she wrote about choosing a school for her daughter. She’s also won a Peabody award, a George Polk Award, the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service, and the Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education reporting. She was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists in 2015.
In 2016, Hannah-Jones co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting. Named after a pioneering African American reporter who counted investigated and reported lynchings, the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting is dedicated to increasing and retaining reporters and editors of color in the field. Led by veteran journalists, the organization also tries to educate journalists and media organizations on including diverse voices to raise caliber, impact, and visibility of their work.
Hannah-Jones grew up in Waterloo, Iowa.
She became interested in journalism when she joined her high school newspaper and began writing about students, like her, who were part of the desegregation effort.
Hannah-Jones has a bachelor’s degree in history and African American Studies from the University of Notre Dame and a master’s degree in journalism and mass communications from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Before going to work at The New York Times in 2015, she worked for the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina; The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon; and ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization in New York City.
Her work has also appeared in The Atlantic Magazine, Huffington Post, Essence Magazine, The Week Magazine, Grist, Politico Magazine and on Face the Nation, This American Life, NPR, the Tom Joyner Morning Show, MSNBC, C-SPAN, Democracy Now and radio stations across the country.
Hannah-Jones, her husband, and their daughter live in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.