Pamela Newkirk is an award-winning journalist, a professor of journalism at New York University, and the author of Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga. Spectacle was a New York Times Editor's Choice and was listed among the Best Books of 2015 by a number of news organizations including NPR, The Boston Globe, and The San Francisco Chronicle, and won a NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award. Newkirk is also the editor of Letters From Black America (FSG, 2009), and her articles have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Nation.
While at MacDowell she worked on Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business, a book examining why after 50 years of diversity efforts, most elite American institutions remain overwhelmingly white. The book was included on Time magazine's 2019 list of "Must-Read" books and widely cited with adapted excerpts appearing in Time, The Guardian, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
