Kai is a Peabody Award-winning host, editor, and writer. His most recent show, Notes from America with Kai Wright, aired live weekly on public radio stations around the country. The show grew out of his critically acclaimed podcast The United States of Anxiety, which marshalled a combination of history, original reporting, and intimate conversation to explain the corrosive political culture that emerged during the 2016 presidential election.
Kai was also the host and co-creator of several documentary podcasts from WNYC Studios. He was host of the Peabody Award-winning podcast Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows, which documents heroic activism in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. He was also host of Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice, which was honored with an Alfred I. duPont Award.
Kai’s introduction to audio journalism came when he made WNYC’s There Goes the Neighborhood. The podcast drew upon a year’s worth of reporting in Brooklyn neighborhoods to describe the economic and cultural forces that drive gentrification, a process that is inseparable from generations of racist housing policy that precede it. The project went on to focus on neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Miami, through reporting partnerships with public radio stations in each city.
Before coming to audio, Kai was a reporter and editor in text for many years. He was features editor of The Nation, editorial director of Colorlines, and an investigative reporting fellow of Type Media Center, among other work.
He is the author of Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York, as well as two surveys of Black American history. And he is a contributor to the best-selling collection Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America.