BIO | KAMILLE D. WHITTAKER
Kamille D. Whittaker is an Atlanta-based journalist and a professor of journalism and digital media at Clark Atlanta University, where she is the Journalism sequence coordinator and Faculty Adviser for The Panther Newspaper and the Communication Arts Journal.
Previously, she served as managing editor of Atlanta magazine.
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In 2020, she co-founded Canopy Atlanta, an award-winning, community-led digital publication and journalism training nonprofit. She directs Canopy's Fellowship program alongside Canopy staff and in collaboration with Atlanta's journalism community.
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She's taught writing to undergraduate and graduate students in Mercer University's Academic Resource Center Online Writing Lab, and was named University of Georgia's Cox Institute for Journalism Innovation, Management and Leadership's Industry Fellow for 2023. She now serves on the Institute's Advisory Board.
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Creatively, she muses at Jump At The Suns—a culture and foodways narrative space; and is conducting research for Perhaps, To Bloom, a storytelling project studying the swelling contemporary Caribbean presence in Atlanta and the South.
Previously, she served first as Staff Writer (2007-2009) and then Associate Editor (2009-2019) for Atlanta Tribune: The Magazine and Atlanta Daily World (2017-2019).
Her tenure in journalism is rooted in the Black Press. She began as an Editorial Intern in 2002 for Black Voice News newspaper in her hometown of Riverside, California.
Immediately following, she worked in the same capacity with the D.C.-based Heldref Publications (now Taylor & Francis), an academic publisher of 40 humanities and scientific journals and The Washington Post in conjunction with Newsweek magazine (formerly WPNI) for the Metro, Education and Health desks, before returning to the Black Press via the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) as a National Correspondent.
In 2005, she began serving the internationally circulated and curated culture, history and politics journal Liberator Magazine as Contributor, Associate Editor and then Co-Editor.
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She was a contributor to Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience in a Time of Pandemic (Lookout Books, 2022), an anthology of essays edited by the late Valerie Boyd.
She is a 2021 graduate of the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication's MFA program in Narrative Nonfiction, and is a 2005 Political Science and Journalism graduate of the (former) John H. Johnson School of Communications at Howard University.
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She happily mothers two daughters, Kamani-Dale and Kennedi-Rae; and is grandmother to Levi Lanell—and a delightful Mini-Rex Bunny, Kesi-Alani.