Vann R. Newkirk II is a senior editor at the Atlantic. He edits a range of stories for the print magazine and website, and is a project lead for the Inheritance project, exploring Black history and American life. His reporting covers climate justice, racial and economic justice, voting rights, and politics across a range of media.
His August 2019 cover story for the Atlantic, “The Great Land Robbery,” which traced the origins of Black land loss to widespread and purposeful dispossession, was nominated for a James Beard Award for Feature Reporting. In 2020, Newkirk cocreated, reported, and hosted the Atlantic’s podcast Floodlines, a story of the unnatural disaster of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, winner of both a 2020 Peabody Award and a 2021 Publisher Podcast Award. In 2018, he cocreated and edited the KING special issue of the Atlantic, about the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Newkirk was named a 2020 11th Hour Fellow at New America and was a recipient of the 2018 ASME NEXT award from the American Society of Magazine Editors.
His project, “Children of the Flood,” chronicles the intertwined histories and fates of some of the oldest Black communities in America, all of which face destruction from climate change and pollution, and seeks to preserve the histories and artifacts of frontline communities that are currently losing ground to the climate crisis.
