Jabari Asim

Jabari Asim was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. He is an author, poet, playwright, and an associate professor of writing, literature and publishing at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. Since 2007, he has been Editor-in-Chief of The Crisis magazine founded in 1910 by W.E.B. Du Bois and published by the NAACP. Asim was awarded a fellowship in nonfiction by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2009. From 1996-2007 Asim served as deputy editor of The Washington Post book review, as well as children's book editor and poetry editor, and as editor of The Washington Post's Education Review. He was a syndicated columnist on political and social issues for The Washington Post Writers Group for three years. Asim is a former vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. He was Scholar-in-Residence in African-American Studies and in the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2008-2010.