Rachel Swarns

Rachel L. Swarns is a journalist, author and associate professor of journalism at New York University, who writes about race and history as a contributing writer for The New York Times. Her articles about Georgetown University and the Catholic Church and their roots in slavery touched off a wave of reckoning within the Catholic Church and a national conversation about American universities and their ties to this painful period of history. Her work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Biographers International Organization, the MacDowell artist residency program and others. Her latest book, THE 272: THE FAMILIES WHO WERE ENSLAVED AND SOLD TO BUILD THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC CHURCH, was published by Random House. In 2023, she was elected to the Society of American Historians. In 2024, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At the Times, Swarns served as a full-time correspondent for 22 years. She has reported from Russia, Cuba, Guatemala and southern Africa, where she served as Johannesburg bureau chief. She has covered immigration, presidential politics and Michelle Obama's role in the White House. She also served as a Metro columnist in New York City. As a senior writer, she helped to lead and innovate on coverage of race and ethnicity. In 2018, she joined NYU, where she is a tenured professor who focuses on American slavery and its legacies. Her work has helped lead to the identification of more than 6,000 descendants of Jesuit slaveholding and has helped prompt Catholic religious leaders and lay people to break new ground in the movement for reparations and reconciliation in America. Her latest book, THE 272, emerged from her reporting at the Times and focuses on Georgetown and the Catholic Church. It was selected as a notable book by the New York Times, the New Yorker, Time, the Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews. It won an American Book Award, a PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Swarns is also the author of AMERICAN TAPESTRY: THE STORY OF THE BLACK, WHITE AND MULTIRACIAL ANCESTORS OF MICHELLE OBAMA, published by Amistad, which traces Mrs. Obama's forbears from slavery to the White House. It was selected as a NYT notable book and as one of Booklist's best biographies. She is a co-author of UNSEEN: UNPUBLISHED BLACK HISTORY FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES PHOTO ARCHIVES, published by Black Dog & Leventhal, and a keynote speaker for the Lavin Agency.