Nikole Hannah-Jones is an award-winning investigative reporter who covers civil rights and racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine and the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University where she is the founding director of the Center for Journalism & Democracy. 

Her reporting has earned her the Pulitzer Prize, the MacArthur “Genius” Grant, the Knight Award for Public Service, the Peabody Award, two George Polk awards, the National Magazine Award three times and an Emmy. She is a Society of American Historians Fellow and a member of the Academy of Arts & Sciences. 

Nikole got her first letter to the editor published at just 11 years old and she became hooked on journalism when she joined her high school newspaper and began writing about students like her, who were bused across town as part of a voluntary school desegregation program, winning her very first journalism award from the Iowa High School Press Association. 

Her heroes are the race beat reporters, such as Ida B. Wells, Ethel Payne, Simeon Booker and Claude Sitton, whose fearless coverage helped move this nation closer to its promise.

Prior to joining The New York Times, Nikole worked as an investigative reporter at ProPublica in New York City, where she spent three years chronicling the way official policy created and maintains segregation in housing and schools. Before that, she reported for the largest daily newspaper in the Pacific Northwest, The Oregonian in Portland, Ore., where she covered numerous beats, including demographics, the census and county government.

Nikole started her journalism career covering the majority-black Durham Public Schools for The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. During her three years there, she wrote extensively on issues of race, class, school resegregation and equity.

Nikole is a native Iowan, a child produced by the hopes of both the Great Migration and those who migrated from foreign shores. She has also lived in Indiana, Georgia, North Carolina and Oregon. Now she is Bed-Stuy fly in Brooklyn.