Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, MacArthur Fellow (genius grant recipient in 2017), and creator of the 1619 Project. Born on April 9, 1976, in Waterloo, Iowa, to parents with roots in the rural South—her father from Mississippi and her mother from Tennessee—she grew up as one of the few Black students in a majority-white community and was bused across town for a voluntary school desegregation program, an experience that ignited her passion for journalism. At age 11, she published her first letter to the editor, and in high school, she wrote for the school newspaper about the impacts of desegregation on students like herself. She earned a B.A. in journalism from the University of Notre Dame in 1998 and an M.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003. Her career began at the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, reporting on education and resegregation in Durham Public Schools, followed by work at ProPublica. She joined The New York Times Magazine in April 2015 as a staff writer, focusing on racial inequality and civil rights. In 2021, she became the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University's School of Communications, where she founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy.