BIO | KAMILLE D. WHITTAKER
Kamille D. Whittaker is an Atlanta-based journalist, non-profit newsroom leader, and a professor of journalism and digital media at Clark Atlanta University, where she is the Faculty Adviser for The Panther Newspaper and the Communication Arts Journal.
Currently, she is conducting research for Perhaps, To Bloom, a narrative and Africana Digital Humanities project studying the swelling contemporary Caribbean presence in Atlanta and the South.
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Whittaker was appointed as a Faculty Fellow for the HistoryMakers Innovations in Pedagogy and Teaching Fellowship for the 2024-2025 academic year.
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 publication and journalism training nonprofit. She has directed Canopy's Fellowship program alongside Canopy staff and in collaboration with Atlanta's journalism community since its founding.
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Elsewhere, 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.​​​
Whittaker's 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 served first as Staff Writer (2007-2009) and then Associate Editor (2009-2019) for Atlanta Tribune: The Magazine and Atlanta Daily World (2017-2019).
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, whom she studied under as a 2021 graduate of the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication's MFA program in Narrative Nonfiction.
She is also a 2005 Political Science and Journalism graduate of the (former) John H. Johnson School of Communications at Howard University.
Creatively, she muses at Jump At The Suns—a culture and foodways narrative space.
She happily mothers two daughters, Kamani-Dale and Kennedi-Rae; and is grandmother to Levi Lanell—and a delightful Mini-Rex Bunny, Kesi-Alani.