BIOGRAPHY FELLOW 2013 – 2014

Pamela Newkirk

For a biography of Ota Benga

Pamela Newkirk is Professor of Journalism at New York University and the author of Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media, which received the National Press Club Award for Media Criticism. She is the editor of A Love No Less: More Than Two Centuries of African American Love Letters, and Letters from Black America. Newkirk has worked as a daily journalist at four different news organizations, including New York Newsday, where in 1990 she was among the reporting team awarded a Pulitzer Prize for spot news. Her primary areas of interest are race in the news media and African American art and culture. As a Leon Levy fellow she worked on a biography of Ota Benga, the Congolese man exhibited at the Bronx Zoo. Her book Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga was published by Amistad / HarperCollins in July 2015.