Guest Contributor

Kai Wright

Kai Wright is a freelance journalist in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. His work explores the politics of sex and race, with a particular focus on the implications for public health. Kai contributes regularly to leading indy and community press such as Out, The Progressive and Poz magazines. He has written for publications ranging from the Village Voice to the San Francisco Chronicle since beginning his journalism career as a reporter for the Washington Blade newspaper in 1997.

Kai is the author of Soldiers of Freedom: An Illustrated History of African Americans in the Armed Forces. The book explores America’s struggle with race as it has been dramatized by the need to staff a viable military. Kai”s also editor of The African-American Archive: The History of the Black Experience Through Documents and has contributed to a number of anthologies.

Kai has also written and edited a series of monographs exploring the political and social dynamics of the AIDS epidemic among African Americans. Published by the Black AIDS Institute, the most recent of these was The Way Forward: The State of AIDS in Black America, 2006.

One of Kai’s favorite assignments came in the fall of 1999 when, as a Pew Fellow in International Journalism, he traveled through southern Africa reporting on the AIDS epidemic as well as the region’s burgeoning gay human rights movement. In July 2000, he returned to southern Africa to report from the XIII International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa. During that trip, he served as project editor for a partnership between the Black AIDS Institute and the National Newspaper Publishers Association that brought daily reports from the historic meeting to hundreds of U.S. black newspapers serving millions of readers. Kai again led the project at the 2002 world AIDS conference in Barcelona, Spain and the 2004 conference in Bangkok, Thailand. He is also working with the Institute to re-launch BlackAIDS.org, a web journal that will facilitate ongoing coverage of the epidemic in the Black Press by offering quality journalism to local papers and national magazines free of charge.

Kai holds a Bachelor of Arts in international studies from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a 1995 Woodrow Wilson Fellow in Public Policy and International Affairs, and studied Arabic at the Middlebury College Language Institute. Prior to launching a freelance business in the spring of 2000, he served as a staff reporter for the Blade, an editorial assistant for Foreign Policy magazine and a desk assistant for PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He relocated to Brooklyn from Washington, D.C. in the fall of 2002, when he joined City Limits magazine as a senior editor. He is a native of Indianapolis, Indiana.

Posted at 11:06 AM, Sep 19, 2006 in Guests | Permalink