Bio
Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and one of the nation's leading reporters on issues of race and justice.
His began his career covering politics but in 2014 was sent to Ferguson, Mo., to cover the police killing of Michael Brown for the Washington Post. In the years that followed, he would chronicle the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement, writing a bestselling book and launching Fatal Force -- a real-time national database of people shot and killed by the police. That database — which remains the most reliable public data on police shootings — won the Pulitzer Prize, the George Polk Award, and the Peabody Award and was named one of the decade’s top 10 works of journalism.
In the years that followed he led and contributed to investigative projects that examined unsolved homicides in major American cities (Pulitzer Prize finalist), what happens to fired police officers, so-called repeat offender criminal defendants, fentanyl overdoses in major cities (in 2017 and 2022), the failures to catch the deadliest serial killer in American history, and what happens to people who are shot by the police and survive. He's latest book, American Whitelash, published in June 2023, chronicles the rise in white supremacist violence in the years since Barack Obama's election.
Lowery hosted “Unfinished: Ernie’s Secret” an investigative podcast that explores the life of Ernest Withers, a legendary civil rights photographer who was also a paid FBI informant. He also served as co-host of “More Than A Vote: Our Voices, Our Vote.” He was an executive producer of In the Cold Dark Night, an Emmy-nominated documentary chronicling the effort to solve the 1983 lynching of Timothy Coggins.
In Mother Jones, he helped edit and contributed both reporting and writing to a series that used machine learning to examine millions of Freedmen’s Bureau documents and revisit Gen. Sherman’s “40 Acres and a Mule” program. For In These Times, he traced Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s path from to becoming the most powerful progressive in American politics. For GQ, he went deep about marriage and monogamy with Will Smith, talked politics and the press with Trevor Noah, dove into the post-scandal life of Andrew Gillum, and chronicled the last days of death row inmate Dustin Higgs. For Men’s Health he wrote about opioid overdoses among black men in Milwaukee and cities across the country. And for EBONY he has profiled Tessa Thompson and Shamiek Moore. At the Washington Post, he embedded with comedian Roy Wood Jr. as he hosted the White House Correspondents Dinner and profiled Viola Fletcher, the oldest living survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, as she fights for reparations.
Awards and Stuff
• Lead reporter on the Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” project, which won the following honors:
-Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, Polk Award for National Reporting, Peabody Award. Finalist for the Sheldon Ring Award and the Goldsmith Prize
• Lead reporter on the Washington Post’s “Murder with Impunity” project, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won an NABJ Salute to Excellence Award
• Contributed to the Boston Globe’s coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings, which was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting
• Ed Bradley Award for Excellence in Investigative Reporting (2024)
• National Headliner Award (2023)
• Arthur E. Rowse Award for Excellence in Examining the News Media (2023)
• Vernon Jarrett Medal for Journalistic Excellence (2022)
• National Headliner Award (2021)
• Webby Award for Best News and Politics Podcast (2021)
• The Frederick Douglass 200 (2019)
• Christopher Isherwood prize for autobiographical prose (2017)
• Ebony 100 (2016) • The Root 100 (2015 & 2016)
• Apex Society Power 30 under 30 recipient • RARE 40 under 40 recipient
• Lotos Foundation Prize in the Arts and Sciences (2017)
• Wayne State University “Spirit of Diversity” Award (2015)
• Emerging Journalist of the Year, The National Assoc of Black Journalists (2014)