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 Photo by Sean Jerd
I'm 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. My writing appears in The New York Times, The Believer, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Boston Review, The New Republic, Jacobin and many other outlets.
I am a former features editor at Al Jazeera America and a founder and former editor-in-chief of Guernica, for which I won a 2017 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Excellence in Editing. My essays in The Baffler, Dissent, and Salon were Notables, respectively, in Best American Essays 2017, Best American Essays 2015 & Best American Essays 2013. I curate a literary series at Brooklyn Public Library's BPL Presents on its main stage, and help present cultural and civic programming throughout the library's 60+ branches. A graduate of Columbia University's School of the Arts, my poetry has appeared in The Paris Review (here & here), The Nation, and Agni. I was awarded a “Discovery”/The Nation Prize by the 92nd Street Y and The Nation. In 2022, I 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 public institution, and together we published an anthology of historical essays, interviews and poetry to accompany the exhibit. In 2024, I 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 the Alfred Barr, Jr. Award for art catalogues for smaller museums.) A former board member of the Overseas Press Club, I was a judge of the Ed Cunningham Award for international magazine reporting. I have 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. I sometimes teach at the School of the New York Times' Summer Academy. I live in Brooklyn, and am working on a novel, and another nonfiction book on the Cold War. NEWS & MEDIA I spoke again with Bob Scheer on my essay for The Believer about the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the purges and mass arrests of the left & what this might have to do with Trump, in a segment he called "The Brutality of American Interference": Scheer Intelligence, April 2, 2025 (read the essay here) I spoke with Patrick Lawrence on my book 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 I spoke with Benjamen Walker for his podcast in a segment called, "Flights, Finks & Secret History (Apple podcasts)": Theory of Everything, Sept 17, 2024 (Player FM) I spoke with the great Eleanor Goldfield about Flights on Project Censored, Pacifica Radio, Sept 16, 2024 I 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, I contributed an essay for the museum catalogue Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories, January 2024 I spoke to Tony Perrottet in the Wall Street Journal's Travel Magazine about progressive American Exiles in Mexico City, March 23, 2023 I spoke with Duncan Gammie for his podcast Dunc Tank on "The CIA v Art," on whether political art is ever any good, Sept 25, 2022 John Train, Paris Review Founder, & Cold War Operative, Dead at 94, Alex Traub, New York Times, Sept 23, 2022 I spoke to Robert Scheer about Paul Robeson and right-wing riots against him in 1949 in my hometown of Peekskill, NY, Scheer Intelligence Podcast, KCRW, Aug, 5, 2022 I was honored to be quoted in a piece for Untapped Cities about the first Lenape-curated exhibit in New York, as hosted at Brooklyn Public Library's Greenpoint Branch, April 2022. I spoke about poets George & Mary Oppen, the FBI & the Cold War with Bob Scheer on Scheer Intelligence, Feb 5, 2021 I had the pleasure of Introducing 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 my work on Guernica in Publishers Weekly, Oct 19, 2007 See more here. |