I’m the editor-in-chief of Guernica magazine, an award-winning global magazine of arts and politics. I’m also a journalist, essayist, teacher, and mentor.
I was the East Africa Bureau Chief for The New York Times; I inaugurated Global Women’s Rights coverage for BuzzFeed News; and my work has been published by The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, the Christian Science Monitor, and in Best American Travel Writing and Best American Science Writing, as well as on public radio. I’ve reported from 30 countries around the world, more than half of them in Africa.
Sometimes, I’m a teacher. I’ve done everything from guest lectures to full semester courses at Columbia, New York University, CUNY, the College of William and Mary, Boston University, Princeton University, and more.
Always, I’m thinking about how journalists can do better work in the aftermath of violence, and often, I’m talking with local colleagues in the places I work about the pressures they face and the improvements they’d like to see in their newsrooms and news cultures.
I work incredibly hard to create pieces that bridge the ubiquitous gap between Western readers and “others,” and over time, I’ve honed strategies — in my research, my interviewing and my writing — that help me do this. This takes intense time and effort, reportorial and psychological, and it takes generous collaboration by sources and local colleagues. I’ve been lucky to work with amazing journalists when I’m out in the field and to be supported, financially and otherwise, by great institutional partners like the International Women’s Media Foundation, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the International Reporting Project of Johns Hopkins University, New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Institute for Journalism, and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and its partner across the pond, the Dart Centre Europe.
I’ve been at this work for roughly 15 years, I’ve won a bunch of awards, and I’ve been privileged to tell some amazing stories. I’m trying to combine journalism’s two missions: Holding the powerful to account, and telling stories about the people around us. Actually, I try to hold the powerful to account by telling stories about the people around us. I think that if you’re only doing one mission at a time, you’re missing out.
I believe in accountability, of the powerful to the rest of us, and of me, to you. I hope I’m helping reveal a little bit more of the world through the stories I get to tell, and I am grateful to readers who tell me when I’m dropping the ball.