Reporting the Nation & New York in Multimedia

New York/Nation Director, Author, Journalist, Full time Faculty 

David J. Dent, an Associate Professor of Journalism and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, is author of In Search of Black America: Discovering the African-American Dream. He has lectured on the “invisible black majority” at universities across the country and has twice won NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences Golden Dozen Award for Excellence in Teaching. He contributes regularly to Vice.com on politics and has written for many publications including The New York Times Magazine, Book Review and Education Life sections, PBS Newshour.com, Psychology Today,, Inc. Fortune Small Business, GQ, Playboy, Essence and The Washington Post. He and his wife, Valerie, are founders of Write for the Future, an organization committed to using the tools of journalism to help high school students improve their writing skills. He has also led nonfiction writing workshops across the country. He is a graduate of Morehouse College and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Mary W. Quigley is a journalist who writes about millennials as well as women and work issues. She writes two blogs, AARP’s Parenting 2.0 and www.mothering21.com, both which tackle parenting emerging adults and beyond. She contributed a chapter on millennials for Understanding Y (Wiley 2014). Her other books include Going Back to Work: A Survival Guide (St. Martin’s Press, 2004). She is also the co-author of And What Do You Do? When Women Chose to Stay Home. (Wildcat Canyon press, 2000). She has freelanced for numerous magazines and newspapers, ranging from More magazine to Newsday. She teaches research, reporting and writing courses on both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Rachel L. Swarns is a journalist, author and associate professor of journalism at New York University, who writes about race and race relations as a contributing writer for The New York Times. Her articles about Georgetown University’s roots in slavery touched off a national conversation about American universities and their ties to this painful period of history. Her work has been recognized and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Biographers International Organization, the MacDowell artist residency program and others. Her latest book, The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to build the American Catholic Church, was published by Random House. In 2023, she was elected to the Society of American Historians. In 2024, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Eliza Griswold is a contributing writer to the New Yorker and the author of 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, a 2018 New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times Critics’ Pick, and The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, which won the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Her translations of Afghan women’s folk poems, I Am the Beggar of the World, was awarded the 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and her original poetry won the 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Art and Letters in Rome. She has held fellowships from the New America Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, Harvard University and the Harvard Divinity School. Her second book of poems, If Men, Then, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in 2020. Griswold is a contributing writer at the New Yorker and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

(Photo by Kathy Ryan)