Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley J. Lowery joined American University and the Investigative Reporting Workshop on July 1 to serve as executive editor of IRW and professor of journalism in AU’s School of Communication.
Lowery is widely regarded as one of the nation’s leading reporters covering issues of law enforcement, race and justice. He is an award-winning journalist, best-selling author, podcast host, on-air correspondent and professor. His writing and reporting also has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, The Atlantic, GQ Magazine, Ebony, Fast Company, Men’s Health and The Wall Street Journal.
He spent seven years as a national correspondent for The Washington Post. In 2015, Lowery pitched and helped lead the Fatal Force project, an unprecedented real-time database to track annual fatal shootings by American police officers. The database, which remains the most reliable public data on police shootings, won the Pulitzer Prize, a Peabody Award and George Polk Award and was named one of the decade’s top 10 works of journalism. His 2018 project Murder With Impunity, with the Post’s Kimbriell Kelly, Ted Mellnik and Steven Rich, an unprecedented look into police failure to solve homicides, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Student journalists from the Investigative Reporting Workshop and its Washington Post practicum contributed to gathering and reporting on the data that underpins each of these major investigations.
Lowery’s first book, They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2017 Christopher Isherwood prize for autobiographical prose from the LA Times Book Prizes. Lowery is undertaking a tour for his new book, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress, which published in June 2023.
