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Professional biography
Kai Wright is a writer and editor in Brooklyn, NY, whose work explores the politics of sex, race, and health. He is senior writer for TheRoot.com. Kai has reported from all over the world for independent and community-based media, ranging from Mother Jones to Essence magazines, and is the author of Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York. Kai also writes and edits a series of monographs exploring the AIDS epidemic among African Americans; they are published by the Black AIDS Institute.
Kai is the author of two books of African-American history. They include Soldiers of Freedom: An Illustrated History of African Americans in the Armed Forces, which explores America’s struggle with race as it has been dramatized by the need to staff a viable military, and The African-American Archive: The History of the Black Experience Through Documents.
He has held several reporting fellowships. As a 2004 fellow of the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Kaiser Family Foundation, he investigated health care in prisons around the country. As an International Reporting Fellow in 1999, he traveled southern Africa exploring the region’s raging AIDS epidemic and its burgeoning gay human rights movement. He has reported a number of stories as a George Washington Williams Fellow of the Independent Press Association.
In addition to his independent work, Kai has served as a senior editor for City Limits magazine, a staff reporter for the Washington Blade newspaper, an editorial assistant for Foreign Policy magazine and a desk assistant for PBS’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He has been publications editor of the Black AIDS Institute since 2000.
Kai holds a Bachelor of Arts in international studies from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in Public Policy and International Affairs and studied Arabic at the Middlebury College Language Institute in Vermont. He is a native of Indianapolis, Indiana. |
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