Nikole Hannah-Jones

About

Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones (born April 9, 1976) is an American investigative journalist known for her coverage of civil rights in the United States. She joined The New York Times as a staff writer in April 2015, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020 for her work on The 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones is the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at the Howard University School of Communications, where she also founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy.

Hannah-Jones was born in Waterloo, Iowa, to father Milton Hannah, who is black and African-American, and mother Cheryl A. Novotny, who is white and of Czech and English descent. Hannah-Jones is the second of their three daughters. She was raised Catholic.
Hannah-Jones and her sister attended predominantly white schools as part of a voluntary program of desegregation busing. She attended Waterloo West High School, where she wrote for the high-school newspaper and graduated in 1994.
After high school, Hannah-Jones attended the University of Notre Dame, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and African-American studies in 1998.
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