Jelani Cobb

Talk Title: The Half-Life of Freedom

Thursday, October 7, 2021, 5:00 pm, Stackhouse Theater

Jelani Cobb is a writer, author and educator whose work addresses intersections of race, politics, history, and American culture.

Cobb has authored several books, including “Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress” and “To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic,” which was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing. He recently edited and wrote a new introduction for his book “The Essential Kerner Commission Report” — a historic study of American racism and police violence — contextualizing it for a new generation.

As a staff writer for The New Yorker, Cobb’s columns on race, the police, and injustice were awarded the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism. He co-edited “The Matter of Black Lives,” a collection of The New Yorker’s most ground-breaking writing on race in America.

As a correspondent for PBS “Frontline,” Cobb has recently released investigated documentaries entitled “Whose Vote Counts,” which explores allegations of voter disenfranchisement and fraud in the 2020 election, and “Policing the Police,” which won the Walter Bernstein Award from the Writer’s Guild of America. He was prominently featured in “13th,” Ava Duvernay’s Oscar-nominated documentary about the current mass incarceration of Black Americans, which traces the subject to its historical origins in the Thirteenth Amendment.

Cobb earned a Ph.D. in American history from Rutgers University.