Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, best-selling author, podcast host and on-air correspondent, has added another line to his impressive resume: journalist in residence at the Newmark J-School.
Lowery is serving students via one-on-one coaching and mentoring sessions and will be teaching an investigative reporting class in the spring.
“Wesley is a generous, kind and brilliant person — a perfect fit for the kind of mission-driven journalism our school stands for,” said Newmark J-School Dean Graciela Mochkofsky.
Lowery has extensively chronicled police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement and specializes in journalism that marshals data to illuminate the realities within the three branches of the American criminal legal system: police, prosecutors and prisons.
He pitched and led the Fatal Force project at The Washington Post, a real-time database that tracks fatal shootings by police officers. Lowery and his colleagues’ work earned the 2016 Pulitzer in National Reporting.
His 2018 project, Murder With Impunity, an unprecedented look at unsolved homicides in major American cities, was a Pulitzer finalist in 2019.
His first book, They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement, was a New York Times bestseller and notched the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose by the LA Times Book Prizes.
At The Marshall Project, he is among the team members working on Testify, an unprecedented effort to examine the criminal courts in his hometown of Cleveland.
For GQ, Lowery has gone deep about marriage and monogamy with Will Smith, talked politics and the press with Trevor Noah, and chronicled the last days of death row inmate Dustin Higgs. His most recent GQ piece is a profile of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Queens, Bronx).
He was an executive producer of In the Cold Dark Night, an Emmy-nominated documentary chronicling the effort to solve the 1983 lynching of Timothy Coggins.
As a correspondent for 60 Minutes+, the streaming version of CBS News’ iconic newsmagazine, Lowery reported from protests in Minneapolis and Kenosha, aboard a crab boat in the Chesapeake Bay, and from the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lowery is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and the Ida B. Wells Society.