Jelani Cobb

Jelani Cobb is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he directs the Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights and is the incoming dean (as of August 2022). He received the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism for his New Yorker columns, which include “The Anger in Ferguson” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Reparations.” For his PBS “Frontline” series “Policing the Police,” the Writer’s Guild of America awarded him the 2017 Walter Bernstein Award. Cobb previously taught history and directed the Africana Studies Institute at University of Connecticut. A recipient of Fulbright and Ford Foundation fellowships, his books include The Substance of Hope.