)
Kristal Brent Zook
Journalist & Author
Kristal Brent Zook
Journalist & Author
Biography
Kristal Brent Zook, Ph.D. is a professor of journalism at Hofstra University in New York. Her entertainment, cultural, and social justice journalism have appeared in dozens of publications, including Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Life, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, Essence, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, and elsewhere. She lives in Miami and New York. She is a former contributor to NPR and has appeared on a wide variety of radio and television outlets such as CNN, C-Span, MSNBC, Fox, TV-One, and MTV.
Dr. Zook is the author of four books: Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television, Black Women’s Lives: Stories of Pain and Power, I See Black People: The Rise and Fall of African American-Owned Television and Radio, and her forthcoming family memoir, The Girl in the Yellow Poncho, to be published by Duke University Press in 2023.
Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television (Oxford University Press 1999) has been mandatory reading in several college courses and was cited in May 2016 issues of both The New York Times Sunday Magazine and The New Yorker. Dr. Zook also appears discussing the book in the 2017 CNN documentary special The Nineties.
Black Women’s Lives: Stories of Power and Pain (Nation Books 2006) vividly illustrates pressing social issues involving education, health, prisons, and culture, through the stories of ten women from all walks of life. This book expands, in part, upon several award-winning articles written for Essence magazine.
I See Black People: The Rise and Fall of African American-Owned Television and Radio (Nation Books 2008) was considered for a 2009 NAACP Image Award and has been required reading in university curricula.
Dr. Zook received her Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from the University of California Santa Cruz. Before coming to Hofstra, she taught African American Studies, Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, and Journalism, at institutions such as UCLA, Murdoch University in Western Australia, and Columbia University’s School of Journalism.
Speaker Videos
The Journey
New book chronicles the experience of growing up biracial in America - New Day NW
"Beyond What You See" with Kristal Brent Zook | Black America
Who is Authentically Black
Fitting In for the First Time
The Multiracial Shift
Grandma: The Bedrock of the Family
Breaking Generational Curses
Speech Topics
The Exploding Multiracial Youth Population
The multiracial college population has grown exponentially over the past 20 years. Zook has spoken on the issue of biracial identity for a very long time, and as a college professor, she has also watched as mixed-race student groups have swelled with this incredible demographic shift in the American population.
More than nine million Americans now describe themselves as being of more than one race. In at least ten states, 25 percent of youth are multiracial and this population is expected to grow by nearly 200 percent in the coming decades. One in six newly married couples is interracial and their children are growing at a rate three times as fast as the general population, with 25 million multiracial babies born each year—making multiracial youth the fastest growing population in the country. Given these numbers, there’s a real hunger for voices like hers who can speak to these shifting identities.
Zook's family memoir The Girl in the Yellow Poncho is a coming-of-age tale about being biracial, grappling with in-betweenness, a father’s abandonment, childhood sexual assault by a neighbor, and a family history with multiple generations of addiction. It addresses being biracial in the 1970s and 1980s, in an era when being biracial was still something strange. Back then, interracial couples were completely absent from television, film, or advertising. This is a story of healing, and a little girl who grows up to be a feminist and social activist. It’s about a struggling journalist who sets out on an inner journey to confront childhood traumas and insecurities.
In 2019, Zook was commissioned to write a six-part series of articles on multiracial identity, looking at this topic from various angles. She included a scientific perspective on how the brain processes mixed-race faces; the topic’s portrayal in culture on the popular sitcom, “Mixed-ish”; and how university officials and students are grappling with this issue on college campuses, to name just a few of the articles.
Invisible Identities: How Your Workplace is Dramatically Shifting in Ways You Can’t See
This talk focuses on the massive growth of interracial marriages and multiracial identities and how their realities are often invisible within corporate cultures. DEI initiatives often mistakenly assume that executives, employees, and clients have “fixed” identities which can be spoken to in a direct black/white way. This is increasingly not the case when so many people within companies are wrestling with or celebrating extended family members of a different race, parenting a mixed-race child, or rethinking the generational assumptions of their parents. Journalist and author Kristal Brent Zook speaks as a biracial woman who looks nearly white, but was raised by two generations of black women, and who has now created a multiracial and international family of her own.
Racial Issues in Higher Education
In the summer of 2020, George Floyd was murdered by police and supporters of #BlackLivesMatter, of all races, creeds, and colors, expanded across the country and the world. What is less known by the public, however, is that 2020 was also the year that #BlackInTheIvory exploded onto Twitter, along with maybe a dozen other similar hashtags featuring academics, professors, graduate students, scientists, and medical professionals speaking out about the isolation and racism that they had experienced within the academy. The issues they documented for the first time in such a comprehensive way, via social media, go deep, as we saw in these movements, with common themes emerging—familiar to those of us in the trenches, but strange and surprising to those who had no idea what was happening on their own campuses.
There was everything from the (now, well-documented) gender and racial biases on student evaluations, to the over-policing of black bodies on campuses, which included, for example, the arrest of a sleeping student at Harvard University’s library, to the unwanted touching of black hair in every setting, from classrooms to faculty meetings. Zook wrote about these issues and the #BlackInTheIvory movement, as well as her own experiences in a Ph.D. program at the University of California Santa Cruz, in “How Black Lives Matter Came to the Academy,” which was published by The New Yorker.
Writing Workshops for Academics, Non-Profits & Corporations
Whether you are hoping to translate a scholarly essay into a newsstand article, or want to express thoughts more clearly for a mainstream audience, this 5-hour workshop is carefully tailored to meet the unique needs of its participants.
Moderator and creator of her own unique brand of intensive writing workshops, Kristal Brent Zook, Ph.D. is a journalist, author and editor with a rare combination of talents. She brings both investigative and reporting skills to rigorous intellectual and academic training in various interdisciplinary fields.
A professional whose work rests squarely in the margins between the academic disciplines of cultural studies, women’s studies, African American studies, and popular journalism, Dr. Zook is uniquely qualified to shed light on the editorial processes of magazines and newspaper publications.
Her workshops are intense lessons offering in-depth, personalized guidance in the following areas: shaping market academic research for a general market audience; eliminating jargon; moving critical analysis from the ivory tower to the newsstand; helping publicists and marketing professionals improve their pitches to reporters and journalists; and understanding the “5 key elements a successful pitch.”
- Avoid blandness and the passive voice
- Spice up your prose
- Focus your message and get to it
- Organize thoughts
- Create more polished and elegant prose
- Know your audience
)
)
)
)