Kevin Sack

Kevin Sack is a veteran journalist who has written broadly about national affairs for more than four decades and has shared in three Pulitzer Prizes. He is also the author of Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church (Crown, 2025), which explores the 200-year history of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, before and after the 2015 massacre of nine parishioners by a young white supremacist. The book was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2026, was named one of the five best nonfiction books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, and was also listed as a best book of the year by National Public Radio, Kirkus Reviews, and Garden & Gun magazine.

Sack spent 30 years on the staff of The New York Times, where he was a senior writer, and worked previously for The Los Angeles Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His work also has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Time, The Boston Globe, Salvation South, and other publications. He taught at Princeton University as a visiting lecturer and Ferris professor of journalism in spring 2026.

At The New York Times, Sack was known for producing long-form narrative and investigative projects on topics as varied as kidney transplantation, police militarization, refugee assimilation, and climate change. He also served as bureau chief in Atlanta and Albany, covered health care for the national desk, and reported extensively on race and domestic and presidential politics.

Sack was among those honored with the 2015 Pulitzer for international reporting for The Times’ coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, having co-authored a special report about the failures of global health groups to contain the epidemic. While at the Los Angeles Times, he and colleague Alan C. Miller won the 2003 Pulitzer for national reporting for an investigative series about the Marine Corps’ troubled Harrier attack jet, which they discovered had crashed 143 times in training, killing 45 pilots. Two years earlier, Sack shared the Pulitzer for national reporting and a George Polk award with a team of New York Times colleagues for the series “How Race is Lived in America,” which was later published in book form. He wrote the lead article about the life of an integrated Pentecostal church in the Atlanta suburbs.

A native of Jacksonville, FL, and 1981 honors graduate of Duke University, Sack lives in Charleston, SC, with his wife, Dina Sack. They have three children.