Magazine Writing

Christopher Benson is Associate Professor of Journalism and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has written for Chicago, Savoy, Jet, and The Crisis magazines, and has contributed to The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times and Reader’s Digest. He has worked as Features Editor and Washington Editor for Ebony magazine. Benson is co-author of Mamie Till-Mobley‘s memoir Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America, (Random House, 2003) about the life and death of her son, Emmett Till, and the history-making changes that followed. Benson also was a co-writer and associate producer of the documentary Paper Trail: 100 Years of the Chicago Defender, and he wrote Matt Damon’s narration script for the documentary Running the Sahara. Benson served as editor for Don’t Block the Blessings: Revelations of a Lifetime, the New York Times bestseller and NAACP Image Award-winning memoir by Patti LaBelle with Laura B. Randolph (Riverhead/Putnam, 1996). He has also worked as a speechwriter for Washington, D.C. politicians.

Charles Whitaker is Helen Gurley Brown Magazine Research Chair at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, where he also has served as a Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished Clinical Professor. He teaches courses in magazine writing and editing and is one of the rotating directors of Medill’s acclaimed Magazine Publishing Project. Whitaker was a senior editor at Ebony magazine and a reporter at the Miami Herald and the Louisville Times (Ky.), and he has written for the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago magazine, Jet magazine, Essence magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Saturday Evening Post, Chicago Parent magazine, and Folio, the magazine of the magazine industry.