Draft:Donovan X. Ramsey

Donovan Xavier Ramsey (born 1987) is an American journalist, author and cultural critic. Ramsey’s work focuses primarily on racial identity, racism politics and patterns of power in the United States.

Early life
Ramsey was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. He attended public schools including Pilgrim Elementary School and the Columbus Africentric School before attending and graduating from Fort Hayes Metropolitan Education Center, a magnet alternative school built around an intensive academic and arts curriculum. At Fort Hayes, Ramsey studied painting, commercial art and art history. He went on to attend and graduate from Morehouse College, where he studied psychology and was managing editor of the college's Maroon Tiger student newspaper. He completed his graduate studies at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he specialized in magazine journalism.

Career
Ramsey's reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, GQ , WSJ Magazine , Ebony, and Essence, among other outlets. He has been a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, NewsOne, and theGrio. He has served as an editor at The Marshall Project and Complex. He was an Emerging Voices Fellow at Demos, a New York City-based public policy organization focusing on social, economic and political equity issues. In 2018, The Open Society Foundations named him a Soros Justice Fellow. In July 2023, Ramsey published When Crack Was King, a book of narrative nonfiction exploring the crack epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s for the One World imprint of Random House.