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Caleb Gayle

Caleb Gayle
Caleb Gayle

Caleb Gayle is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism with a joint appointment in Africana Studies (CSSH). He is an award-winning journalist who writes about the history of race and identity. A senior fellow at Northeastern’s Burnes Center for Social Change, he holds fellowships from New America, PEN America, and Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author of We Refuse to Forget. Winner of the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, Gayle’s writing has appeared in The New York Times MagazineThe AtlanticTIME, The GuardianGuernica, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, among many other publications. His nonfiction work has been recognized as part of the Notable Essays Collection of the 2019 Best American Essays.

Gayle has also won the Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship, the Truman Scholarship, the Rotary Ambassadorial Fellowship, the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship, among others. Gayle is also one of 10 writers launching the Baldwin-Emerson Fellowship capturing the oral histories and artifacts from hundreds of elders from across the country through the support of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics, and the Emerson Collective. Gayle’s forthcoming books include Pushahead: The Story of Edward McCabe and his Dreams of Colonization and a children’s book, What Was the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921?

Prior to Northeastern, Gayle served as a Lecturer at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at the CUNY-City College of New York, and a Visiting Scholar at the Arthur Carter Journalism Institute at NYU. He also worked as a writer for the Guardian. Gayle also spent time in management consulting at Boston Consulting Group, a fellow at the think tank Demos, in philanthropy as a Program Officer at the George Kaiser Family Foundation and venture capital, where he still serves as a Venture Partner at Atento Capital.

Departments

Journalism

Education

  • MBA, Harvard Business School
  • MPP, Harvard University – John F. Kennedy School of Government
  • MSc, University of Oxford
  • BA, University of Oklahoma

Awards

  • New America National Fellowship
  • Walter Jackson Bate Fellow, Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
  • Fellow, PEN America
  • Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award
  • Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow, Center for Fiction

Research/Publications Highlights

  • We Refuse to Forget , Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House, 2022
  • What was the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921? Penguin Workshop, 2023
  • Pushahead: The Story of Edward McCabe and his Dreams of Colonization , Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House (forthcoming: 2024)