Speaker Bios

Nikole Hannah-Jones has spent her career investigating racial inequality and injustice, and her reporting has earned her the MacArthur Fellowship, known as the “Genius Grant,” a Peabody Award, two George Polk Awards and the National Magazine Award three times. She also serves as the Knight Chair of Race and Journalism at Howard University, where she founded the Center for Journalism & Democracy. Hannah-Jones is also the co-founder of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, which seeks to increase the number of investigative reporters and editors of color, and in 2022 she opened the 1619 Freedom School, a free, afterschool literacy program in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa. Hannah-Jones holds a Master of Arts in Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned her BA in History and African-American studies from the University of Notre Dame.

Ibi Zoboi was born in Haiti. When she was four, she immigrated to New York with her mother. Zoboi is the author of numerous titles including American Street (2017), which was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award in Young Adult’s Literature, a Time Magazine Best YA Book Of All Time, and a Kirkus Best Book of the Year; Pride (2018), a contemporary remix of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; and My Life As An Ice Cream Sandwich (2020), a moving middle-grade debut of a girl finding her place in a world that’s changing at warp speed. Zoboi is also the co-author of the Walter Award and L.A. Times Book Prize-winning Punching the Air (2021) with prison reform activist Dr. Yusef Salaam, an Exonerated Five member, which was also shortlisted for the U.K.’s Yoto Carnegie Medal. She has appeared on CBS This Morning and The Reid Out alongside Yusef Salaam, and on PBS’s Book View Now. Her writing has been published in The New York Times Book Review, the Horn Book Magazine, and The Rumpus, among others.

Dr. Yusef Salaam was tried and convicted in the “Central Park Jogger” case along with four other Black and Latinx young men at just fifteen years young. The Exonerated Five spent between seven to 13 years behind bars for crimes they did not commit, until their sentences were overturned in 2002. Since then, they have received a multi-million dollar settlement from the city of New York for its injustice and have been profiled in award-winning films, including The Central Park Five documentary from Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon and most recently the Emmy award-winning Netflix limited series When They See Us, written and directed by Ava DuVernay. Over the past two decades, Yusef has become a family man, father, poet, activist and inspirational speaker. He continues to utilize his platform to share his story with others and educate the public about the impact of mass incarceration and police brutality rooted in our justice system. He regularly advocates for criminal justice reform, prison reform and the abolition of juvenile solitary confinement and capital punishment, specifically restoring “humanity” of those incarcerated and those trodden down by the spike wheels of justice. He coauthored the book, "Punching the Air" (2021) with Ibi Zoboi.

Maria Hinojosa's nearly thirty-year career as a journalist includes reporting for PBS, CBS, WGBH, WNBC, CNN, NPR, and anchoring and executive producing the Peabody Award–winning show Latino USA, the longest running national Latinx news program in the country, distributed by PRX. She is a frequent guest on MSNBC, and has won several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, four Emmys, the Studs Terkel Community Media Award, two Robert F. Kennedy Awards, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Overseas Press Club, and the Ruben Salazar Lifetime Achievement Award. Her seven-part podcast series Suave won the Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting in 2022. She has also been inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2010 she founded Futuro Media, an independent nonprofit newsroom and production company with the mission of producing multimedia content from a POC perspective. Through the breadth of her work and as the founding coanchor of the political podcast In the Thick, Hinojosa has informed millions about the changing cultural and political landscape in America and abroad. She lives with her family in Harlem in New York City.

Alexander Byrd is an associate professor of history. His area of expertise is Afro America, especially black life in the Atlantic world and the Jim Crow South. He has published essays addressing current debates over the nativity of Olaudah Equiano, and treating the social consequences of violence in the transatlantic slave trade. His essay “Eboe, Country, Nation, and Gustavus Vasa’s Interesting Narrative” was named the 2010 winner of Douglass Adair Memorial Award for best article published in the William and Mary Quarterly during the preceding six years. Byrd's other published work addresses teaching the history of lynching and explores practicalities of civic engagement in African American studies research. He is a four-time recipient of the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching (2006, 2013, 2015, and 2018) and in 2010 he was the recipient of the Presidential Mentoring Award. In 2020, the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation recognized Byrd as one of the year’s 10 Piper Professors. Professor Byrd has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. He is a member of the American Historical Association, and a life member of the Southern Historical Association. From 2016 through 2019 Byrd served on the council of Omohundro Institute.