2024 Hosokawa Journalism Lecture: Storytelling Against the Crisis

The 2024 Hosokawa Journalism Lecture will feature Vann R. Newkirk II. Newkirk is a senior editor at The Atlantic, and the host and co-creator of narrative podcasts “Floodlines” and “Holy Week.” For years, Newkirk has covered voting rights, democracy and environmental justice, with a focus on how race and class shape the country’s and the world’s fundamental structures, across media.

Newkirk is a 2022 Andrew Carnegie fellow, and was a 2020 James Bear Award finalist, a 2020 11th Hour Fellow at New America, and a 2018 recipient of the American society of Magazine Editors’s ASME Next Award. In 2021, Newkirk received the Peabody Award for “Floodlines.” His journalism inspired the 2022 documentary film “Lownes Country and the Road to Black Power.”

Newkirk will speak on “Storytelling Against the Crisis”: As the country faces the twinned issues of a climate crisis and racial inequality, with each posing a threat to our history, what tools can actually stand in the way of an apocalypse? Journalism, oral history, documentary, and photography by and in vulnerable communities will be critical in changing the story about who we are, and in slowing the onslaught of climate change that affects marginalized people most.