Wesley Lowery

Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and New York Times Best Seller, is renowned as a leading authority on matters of race and justice. He serves as the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop, an innovative journalism non-profit based at American University in Washington, D.C. The workshop trains the next generation of journalists by partnering them with professional newsrooms to address crucial gaps in media coverage.

Additionally, Lowery is a Journalist-in-Residence at the CUNY Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and a contributing editor at The Marshall Project.

He began his career covering politics but in 2014 was assigned to Ferguson, Missouri, to report on the police killing of Michael Brown for the Washington Post. In the years that followed, he chronicled the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement, authored a bestselling book, and launched Fatal Force—an acclaimed real-time national database of people shot and killed by the police. This database, recognized as the most reliable public data on police shootings, earned him the Pulitzer Prize, the George Polk Award, and the Peabody Award, and it was named one of the decade’s Top 10 works of journalism.

Lowery led and contributed to investigative projects examining unsolved homicides in major American cities, the outcomes for fired police officers, so-called repeat offender criminal defendants, fentanyl overdoses in major cities (in 2017 and 2022), the failures to apprehend the deadliest serial killer in American history, and the experiences of people shot by the police and surviving. His latest book, and New York Times Best Seller, "American Whitelash," debuted in mid 2023, chronicles the rise in white supremacist violence in the years since Barack Obama's election.

Lowery hosted "Unfinished: Ernie’s Secret," an investigative podcast exploring the life of Ernest Withers, a legendary civil rights photographer who was also a paid FBI informant. He also served as a co-host of “More Than A Vote: Our Voices, Our Vote” and 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.

Lowery has made impactful contributions across various media outlets. In These Times, an independent publication focused on analyzing new movements on the American Left, featured his work tracing Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's journey to becoming a powerful progressive in American politics. With GQ, he engaged in diverse discussions, exploring marriage with Will Smith, dissecting politics and the press with Trevor Noah, investigating Andrew Gillum's post-scandal life, and chronicling death row inmate Dustin Higgs' final days. Additionally, Men’s Health published Lowery diving into the critical issue of opioid overdoses among black men in Milwaukee and cities nationwide. Lastly, in EBONY, he skillfully profiled notable figures such as Tessa Thompson and Shamiek Moore, solidifying his reputation as a multifaceted and insightful journalist.