Channing Gerard Joseph

Channing Gerard Joseph (2020) is a former staff editor and writer at The New York Times and the Associated Press, and he was the first African-American editor of San Francisco Weekly. His reportage and essays have appeared around the globe in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, ​U.S. News & World Report,​ ​People​, The Daily Mail​, ​The New Zealand Herald,​ ​ABC​, ​NBC​, ​FOX​, ​CBS​, ​BET​, ​CNN​, ​MTV News and many other publications, including the 2013 New York Times anthology “The Socialite Who Killed a Nazi With Her Bare Hands.” In 2016, he was a fellow of the International Center for Journalists and has received support from the Ford Foundation, the Scripps Howard Foundation, and the Brooks and Joan Fortune Family Foundation. He teaches journalism at the University of Southern California. He is a 2019 winner of both the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and the Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship.

 As a Logan Nonfiction fellow, Channing will work on his book, “House of Swann: Where Slaves Became Queens—and Changed the World,” which follows the untold true story of William Dorsey Swann—an African-American man born into slavery who became the world’s first self-described “drag queen” and the leader of possibly the world’s earliest-known gay liberation organization. The book will be published by Crown/Picador.