Dorothy Wickenden is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her recent work has explored topics such as the last lighthouse keeper in America, Stephen Satterfield’s efforts to trace Black cuisine through American history, the rewilding movement in India, the life and activism of Wendell Berry, and the pre–Civil War fight against white supremacy.

Wickenden is the author of The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights (Scribner, 2021) and Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West (Scribner, 2011), a New York Times bestseller. She served as executive editor of The New Yorker for 26 years and hosted The Political Scene podcast from 2007 to 2022.

Earlier in her career, Wickenden was the executive editor of The New Republic, where she edited The New Republic Reader: Eighty Years of Opinion and Debate (Basic Books, 1994), and was national affairs editor of Newsweek from 1993 to 1995. She has received fellowships from the Nieman Foundation and MacDowell.