Philippe Wamba, a beloved member of our Advisory Board, died in a car accident on September 11, 2002. Below is his bio, which has appeared in these pages ever since our magazine began publishing. We will always be grateful for the support Philippe gave to us, and for the friendship he blessed us with.

Philippe Wamba is a Congolese-African American journalist and the editor in chief of Africana.com, a Web site devoted to coverage of the world of Africa and her diaspora. Born in California in 1971, he was raised in Massachusetts and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He attended primary and secondary school in Tanzania, and studied history and literature at Harvard University, graduating in 1993. He earned a master's degree in journalism at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 1994, and his articles and features have appeared in journals and newspapers in London, Africa, and the United States. He worked as a researcher and writer on Encarta Africana and the Dictionary of Global Culture, and as an editor at Macmillan General Reference. He is the author of Kinship: A Family's Journey in Africa and America, and a contributor to Transition, the Weekly Journal (London), Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural , and Giant Steps: African American Writing for a New Millennium. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts and New York City.

 

Marcia Ann Gillespie is the editor in chief of Ms. magazine, the country's leading feminist publication. She has worked there since 1980, starting out as a contributing editor and becoming a featured columnist and then executive editor. In her seven years as Ms . magazine's top editor, Gillespie has worked to make the publication a welcome table for a range of voices and views, opening it to an ever more diverse readership and paying more attention to the concerns of younger women. She also serves as the president of Liberty Media for Women, a limited liability corporation that owns Ms. magazine and is comprised of women investors. Before she came to Ms. magazine, Gillespie was editor in chief of Essence, a magazine for African American women, throughout the seventies. During her tenure the then fledgling publication became one of the fastest growing women's magazines in the United States, increasing its circulation from less than 50,000 to 750,000 and winning the prestigious National Magazine Award. She has been honored by organizations ranging from New York Women in Communication to the National Council of Negro Women, and was named "One of the Fifty Faces for America's Future" by Time magazine. She received the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism--the highest honor the University of Missouri School of Journalism bestows. A frequent speaker on college campuses and at women's conferences across the country, Gillespie also serves as a member of the board of directors for groups like Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, and the Violence Policy Center.

 

Named one of the "Ten Most Dangerous Minds" in the academy by Rolling Stone magazine, Noel Ignatiev is a leading thinker in the study of whiteness. He worked for over twenty years in steel mills, farm equipment plants, and machine-tool and electrical parts factories, before obtaining his doctorate from Harvard University. He is a co-founder and editor of the journal Race Traitor and one of the founders of the New Abolitionist Society, an organization committed to eradicating the "historically constructed social formation" of the white race. He has written How the Irish Became White and co-edited the Race Traitor anthology, which won the 1997 American Book Award. When he is not raising a ruckus, Ignatiev teaches in the Department of Critical Studies at Massachusetts College of Art and is a fellow at Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute. A frequent public speaker, he has also taught at Bowdoin College and Harvard University.

 

Bob Keeler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at Newsday. He began at Newsday in 1971 and has covered local, state and national politics for the newspaper as well as editing the Sunday magazine. He won the Pulitzer in 1996 for a series of articles about the life of a multicultural parish, St. Brigid's Roman Catholic Church in Westbury, New York. Keeler developed the series into a book, Parish!, which one reviewer called "the best kind of religious journalism ... fanatically faithful to the sensitivities of both critical and credulous readers and also to the experiences of the worshippers who are the subjects of his stories." Keeler has also written Newsday: A Candid History of the Respectable Tabloid and Days of Intense Emotion: Praying with Pope John Paul II in the Holy Land, with co-author Paul Moses. He now serves on Newsday's editorial board, and lectures widely on journalism and religion.

 

Anne MacKinnon is a freelance writer, researcher, and teacher in Casper, Wyoming. She has an A.B. from Radcliffe College and a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. From 1979 to 1995, she was reporter, then Assistant Managing Editor, then Editor of the Casper Star-Tribune, the state daily newspaper of Wyoming. At the Star-Tribune, she specialized in energy and natural resources issues. Currently, she researches the history of water laws and resource allocation and teaches courses on these subjects at the University of Wyoming. MacKinnon is also involved in advocacy work, most recently addressing the impact of refinery closings have on nearby working-class neighborhoods.

 

Sreenath Sreenivasan is a journalism professor at Columbia University, where he specializes in new media. Named one of India Today's "40 leaders under 40" in the United States, he is co-founder of the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), a group of more than 700 South Asian journalists from around the world. He also serves on the Board of Advisers for Inequality.org, a news site about the divide in American income, wealth, and health. Sreenivasan helped found the Online News Association in 1998 and is founding administrator of the Online Journalism Awards, a new set of international prizes run by Columbia. He works as a freelance journalist, having recently written for Time Digital, The New York Times, Business Week, India Today and Rolling Stone. He has also worked as a freelance producer for the "Nightly Business Report" on PBS and a reporter in India. In his spare time, Sreenivasan works as an editorial consultant on various media projects, applying a "wrecking ball" to Web sites. He is a frequent commentator and speaker on various issues, including trends affecting journalism, the Internet, South Asians, and minorities. He regularly appears as the Tech Guru on WABC-TV in New York. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Roopa Unnikrishnan. Reach Sreenivasan at or www.sree.net.

 

Ray Suarez has twenty years of varied experience in the news business. Since October 1999, he has been a Washington-based senior correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, the award-winning nightly news show distributed by PBS. Suarez came to The NewsHour from National Public Radio, where he had been host of the nationwide, call-in news program "Talk of the Nation" since 1993. Prior to that, he spent seven years covering local, national, and international stories for the NBC affiliate WMAQ-TV in Chicago. Suarez was also a Los Angeles correspondent for CNN, a producer for the ABC Radio Network in New York, a reporter for CBS Radio in Rome, and a reporter for various American and British news services in London. Suarez penned the recent book, The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration: 1966-1999,and contributed to another, Las Christmas: Favorite Latino Authors Share Their Holiday Memories. His essays and criticisms have been published in The New York Times , The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The Baltimore Sun, among other publications. Suarez shared in NPR's 1993-94 and 1994-95 duPont-Columbia Silver Baton Awards for on-site coverage of the first all-race elections in South Africa and the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, respectively. He has been honored with the 1996 Ruben Salazar Award, Current History Magazine's 1995 Global Awareness Award, and a Chicago Emmy Award. Suarez holds a B.A. in African History from New York University and an M.A. in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, where he studied urban affairs. A longtime member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Suarez is a founding member of the Chicago Association of Hispanic Journalists. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two children.

 

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine, which reports on and analyzes the intersection of faith, politics, and culture. Founded in 1971, the publication has a readership of about 80,000 people. He is also the convener of Call to Renewal, a national federation of churches and faith-based organizations working to overcome poverty. Call to Renewal has just launched a covenant and a ten-year campaign that will bring together churches and faith-based organizations to put poverty on the national agenda. Wallis has written numerous books, most recently The Soul of Politics (1994) and Who Speaks for God?: A New Politics of Compassion, Community, and Civility (1996). His latest book, Faith Works , is part memoir and part inspirational game plan for transforming our lives and society through community involvement. Wallis travels extensively in the United States and internationally, speaking, preaching, debating, and leading seminars and retreats. Articles and columns by or about him have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines, and he is a regular contributor on ethics and public life for MSNBC Online. Wallis spent the 1998-99 academic year as a fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School, and in the fall 1999 semester he taught a course on "Faith, Politics, and Society" at the Kennedy School of Government. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife Joy and son Luke.

 

Selected by Time magazine as one of America's 25 Most Influential People, William Julius Wilson is Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. Only 17 of Harvard's professors currently hold University Professorships, Harvard's highest professorial distinction. After teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Wilson joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1972, eventually becoming a university professor and director of its Center for the Study of Urban Inequality. He joined the faculty at Harvard in July of 1996. Past President of the American Sociological Association, Wilson has received 32 honorary degrees, including honorary doctorates from Princeton, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, and the University of Amsterdam in Holland. He was a MacArthur Prize fellow from 1987 to 1992, and he received the 1998 National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor in the United States. Wilson is the author of several award-winning books, including The Declining Significance of Race, The Truly Disadvantaged , and When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor . His latest book is The Bridge over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics. Other honors granted to Wilson include the Seidman Award in Political Economy (the first and only non-economist to receive the Award); the American Sociological Association's Award for Public Understanding of Sociology; and the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Award (granted by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Los Angeles). Professor Wilson is a member of numerous national boards and commissions, including the President's Commission on White House Fellowships, The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and The Century Foundation.

 

Daniel Wolff writes reviews and poetry. As a cultural critic, he specializes in pop music, publishing articles in DoubleTake , Oxford American, and Rock and Rap Confidential . He has also written the award-winning 1995 biography of the musician Sam Cooke, You Send Me. Wolff's poetry has appeared in the Paris Review and the Partisan Review. In addition to writing, Wolff is involved in grassroots activity in his hometown near New York City, where he and other parents have been trying to make the school district aware of the unequal performance of minority students and to figure out a way to improve public education for all.

 

Helen Zia is the author of the critically acclaimed book, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, published in March 2000. She is an award-winning journalist and a Contributing Editor to Ms. Magazine, where she was formerly Executive Editor. Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Essence, A.Magazine , The Advocate , OUT!, Sojourner, and many other publications. She has contributed essays to several anthologies and was executive editor of the book, Notable Asian Americans . She is a columnist for AsianWeek newspaper; the Asian American Village, an Asian American online magazine, and the Microsoft online network. In 1999 Zia was named one of the most influential Asian Americans of the decade by A.Magazine. The Organization of Chinese Americans designated her as the Chinese American Journalist of the Year in 1998. A second generation Chinese American, Zia has been a long-time activist for social justice on issues ranging from civil rights and peace to women's rights and countering hate violence. In 1997 she testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on the impact of the campaign finance hearings on Asian Americans, and helped author a complaint to the Commission against Congress, the Democratic and Republican National Committees, and the news media for racially discriminatory treatment of Asian Americans. Zia traveled to Beijing in 1995 to the United Nations Fourth World Congress on Women as part of a journalists of color delegation. Her work on the Asian American landmark civil rights case of anti-Asian violence is documented in the Academy Award-nominated film, "Who Killed Vincent Chin?"

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