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Malia Politzer is the executive editor of piqd.com, and an award-winning long-form journalist based out of Spain. She specializes in reporting on migration, international development, human rights issues and investigative reporting.
Originally from California, she's lived in China, Spain, Mexico and India, and reported from various countries in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Her primary beats relate to immigration, economics and international development. She has published articles in Huffington Post Highline, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue India, Mint, Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, Reason Magazine, and the Phoenix New Times. She is also a regular contributor to Devex.
Her Huffington Post Highline series, "The 21st Century Gold Rush" won awards from the National Association of Magazine Editors, Overseas Press Club, and American Society of Newspaper Editors. She's also won multiple awards for feature writing in India and the United States.
Her reporting has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Institute For Current World Affairs, and the Global Migration Grant.
Degrees include a BA from Hampshire College and MS from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where was a Stabile Fellow at the Center for Investigative Journalism.
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Article: A Most American Terrorist / The Making Of Dylann Roof
The Pulitzer Prizes were awarded last week. And while all the award-winning reporting was exceptional, one in particular stood out to me: An article about Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old white supremacist who entered a black church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015, and shot and killed nine people—all of them African American. At his conviction hearing the following year, Roof would be the first person sentenced to death for a hate crime in the entire history of the United States.
The author, journalist Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, wrote more than a profile of a terrorist and killer: On one hand, the article was a thoughtful and deeply investigative inquiry into Roof's history and radicalization. Yet even while she examined what made this particular terrorist tick, she never lost sight of the larger influences that created him: The systemic and institutional racism of the society and culture in which Roof came of age.
Ghansah interviews Roof's family, classmates, teachers, colleagues and friends. She also follows the path of Roof's GPS (recovered by police after his arrest), which took her on a journey through historical sites linked to slavery and Confederate history. Perhaps the most important part of the article was how she continuously puts this one killer in a larger context. Through her reporting and writing, Ghansah implies that Roof might not be the outlier that the media has made him out to be—that the vast majority of Americans hopes he is—but instead the sign of more to come:
Roof is what happens when we prefer vast historical erasures to real education about race. The rise of groups like Trump's Republican Party, with its overtures to the alt-right, has emboldened men like Dylann Roof to come out of their slumber and loudly, violently out themselves. But in South Carolina, those men never disappeared, were there always, waiting. It is possible that Dylann Roof is not an outlier at all, then, but rather emblematic of an approaching storm.
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