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 Photo by Sean Jerd
<br>Joel Whitney is a Brooklyn-based writer, the author of Flights: Radicals on the Run (order here) and Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers.
His writing appears in The New York Times, The Believer, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek Boston Review, The New Republic, Jacobin and many other outlets. Joel is a former features editor at Al Jazeera America and a founder and former editor-in-chief of Guernica, for which he won a 2017 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Excellence in Editing. His essays in The Baffler, Dissent, and Salon were Notables, respectively, in Best American Essays 2017, Best American Essays 2015 & Best American Essays 2013. And his work has been translated into eleven languages. Joel curates a literary series at Brooklyn Public Library's BPL Presents on its main stage, and helps present cultural and civic programming throughout the library's 60+ branches. A graduate of Columbia University's School of the Arts, his poetry has appeared in The Paris Review (here & here), The Nation, and Agni. He was awarded a “Discovery”/The Nation Prize by the 92nd Street Y and The Nation. His short fiction has appeared in Pleiades, in a fall 2025/spring 2026 double issue. In 2022, Joel was part of a team at Brooklyn Public Library that invited Joe Baker and Hadrien Coumans of the Lenape Center to present "Lenapehoking," New York City's first Lenape-curated exhibition at a major public institution, and together they published an anthology of historical essays, interviews and poetry to accompany the exhibit. In 2024, Joel contributed an essay to the exhibition catalog Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories, for an exhibition that ran at the Michener Art Museum in 2023 - 2024. (In 2025, Never Broken earned its editors, Joe Baker and Laura Igoe, the Alfred Barr, Jr. Award for art catalogues for smaller museums.) A former board member of the Overseas Press Club, Joel was a judge of the Ed Cunningham Award for international magazine reporting. He has taught narrative nonfiction at the Writer's Foundry MFA program at St. Joseph's College in Brooklyn, as well as English and writing at Fordham University, Cooper Union, and John Jay College. Joel sometimes teaches at the School of the New York Times' Summer Academy. He lives in Brooklyn, and is working on a novel, and another nonfiction book on the Cold War in Indonesia. NEWS & MEDIA Joel spoke with Bob Scheer about Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the purges and mass arrests of the left in 1965, Trump in 2025: "The Brutality of American Interference," Scheer Intelligence, April 2, 2025 (read the essay here) Joel spoke with Patrick Lawrence on Flights and the long tradition of anticommunist persecution even of non-communists throughout the Cold War in "Acrobats of the American Century": Scheerpost, Dec 31, 2024 Joel spoke with the great Eleanor Goldfield about Flights on Project Censored, Pacifica Radio, Sept 16, 2024 Joel spoke about Flights on Scheer Intelligence on NPR, with Robert Scheer, KCRW, Aug 2, 2024 Behind the News, with Doug Henwood, Jacobin Radio (Apple, Player FM), June 19, 2024 By invitation of the Lenape Center's Joe Baker, Joel contributed an essay for the Michener museum catalogue Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories, January 2024 Joel spoke to Tony Perrottet in the Wall Street Journal's Travel Magazine about progressive American Exiles in Mexico City, March 23, 2023 Joel spoke with Duncan Gammie for his podcast Dunc Tank on "The CIA v Art," on whether political art is generally not as good as apolitical art, Sept 25, 2022 John Train, Paris Review Founder, & Cold War Operative, Dead at 94, Alex Traub, New York Times, Sept 23, 2022 Joel spoke to Robert Scheer about Paul Robeson and right-wing riots against him in 1949 in his hometown of Peekskill, NY, Scheer Intelligence Podcast, KCRW, Aug, 5, 2022 Joel was quoted in an essay for Untapped Cities about the first Lenape-curated exhibit in New York, as hosted at Brooklyn Public Library's Greenpoint Branch, April 2022. Joel spoke about poets George & Mary Oppen, the FBI & the Cold War with Bob Scheer on Scheer Intelligence, Feb 5, 2021 Joel introduced Edward Snowden at Brooklyn Public Library, in conversation with the ACLU's Anthony Romero, CSPAN, Sept 26, 2019 Radio interview with Doug Henwood, Behind the News (33:33), KPFA/Jacobin Radio, July 11, 2019 Podcast interview with John Dolan & Mark Ames (paywall), Radio War Nerd, March 21, 2019 Radio interview with Larry Bensky, Ideas and Ideals, KPFA-Berkeley, Feb 22, 2019 Radio interview with Doug Henwood, Behind the News (minute 26), KPFA/Jacobin Radio, Feb 21, 2019 "Joel Whitney & Michael Archer of Guernica awarded PEN's Nora Magid Award for Editing," Feb 22, 2017 Angela Chen, "Salman Rushdie on his latest 'wonder tale': 'We now live in a very strange time'," The Guardian, Oct 19, 2015 Patrick Iber, "Literary Magazines for Socialists, Funded by the CIA," The Awl, Aug 24, 2015 Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Peter Matthiessen, Lyrical Writer and Naturalist, is Dead at 86," New York Times, April 5, 2014 Adam Krause, "Did the CIA propagate rock n roll?" The Awl, Dec 18, 2013 Orion Jones, "Did Chinua Achebe Achieve a Global Canon of the Arts?" Big Think, March 25, 2013 Tess Elliott, "Cruel Landscapes: An interview with Joel Whitney," Point Reyes Light, March 21, 2013 Jennifer Schuessler, "Salon Article Rekindles Debate about Paris Review and CIA," New York Times, May 29, 2012 On Verso's Counterblasts, in which I stand in for Belen Fernandez, CSPAN/Leftforum, March 17, 2012 "Guernica: Lit Mag Beats the Odds," about our work on Guernica in Publishers Weekly, Oct 19, 2007 See more here. |