Caleb Gayle

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Caleb Gayle is an award-winning journalist who writes about race and identity and a professor at Northeastern University, a senior fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change, and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is the author of the book We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power (Riverhead Books, 2022), which offers a narrative account of how many Black Native Americans were divided and marginalized by white supremacy in America.  

At Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Gayle is working on his latest project, “PUSHAHEAD: The Story of Edward McCabe and His Dreams to Colonize,” about the true-life story of a Black politician who tried to make Oklahoma into an all-Black state.  

Gayle’s writing has been recognized by the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship, the Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writers Fellowship, and the New America Fellowship, among others. His writing has been featured in the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, Guernica, the Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, the New Republic, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Pacific Standard, and the Threepenny Review, among others, and anthologized as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2019 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). Gayle completed his undergraduate studies as a Harry S. Truman Scholar at the University of Oklahoma, his MSc at the University of Oxford, his MBA at Harvard Business School, and his MPP at Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow.

Black, Evangelical and Torn (New York Times Magazine, 3/14/23)