Meet the Speaker: Wesley Lowery

Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and one of the nation’s leading reporters on issues of race and justice. He is the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop, an innovative “training hospital” journalism non-profit based at American University in Washington DC that trains a rising generation of journalists by partnering them with professional newsrooms to work on projects that fill crucial gaps in media coverage. He is also a Journalist-in-Residence at the CUNY Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and a contributing editor at The Marshall Project.

His began his career covering politics but in 2014 was sent to Ferguson, Mo., to cover the police killing of Michael Brown for the Washington Post. In the years that followed, he would chronicle the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement, writing a bestselling book and launching Fatal Force — a real-time national database of people shot and killed by the police. That database — which remains the most reliable public data on police shootings — won the Pulitzer Prize, the George Polk Award, and the Peabody Award and was named one of the decade’s top 10 works of journalism.

In the years that followed he led and contributed to investigative projects that examined unsolved homicides in major American cities (Pulitzer Prize finalist), what happens to fired police officers, so-called repeat offender criminal defendants, fentanyl overdoses in major cities (in 2017 and 2022), the failures to catch the deadliest serial killer in American history, and what happens to people who are shot by the police and survive. He’s latest book, American Whitelash, published in June 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 that explores the life of Ernest Withers, a legendary civil rights photographer who was also a paid FBI informant. He also served as co-host of “More Than A Vote: Our Voices, Our Vote.” 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.

For In These Times, he traced Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s path from to becoming the most powerful progressive in American politics. For GQ, he went deep about marriage and monogamy with Will Smith, talked politics and the press with Trevor Noah, dove into the post-scandal life of Andrew Gillum, and chronicled the last days of death row inmate Dustin Higgs. For Men’s Health he wrote about opiod overdoses among black men in Milwaukee and cities across the country. And for EBONY he has profiled Tessa Thompson and Shamiek Moore.