James Kirchick is a columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail, and author of the instant New York Times bestseller, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. A widely published journalist, he has reported from over 40 countries, and his reportage, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Spectator, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, New York, Rolling Stone, and the Times Literary Supplement, among many other publications within the United States and around the world. His first book, “The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age,” was published by Yale University Press in 2017.
Kirchick is presently a Nonresident Senior Fellow for the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council, and has been a fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and the Robert Bosch Foundation in Berlin. Previously, he was writer-at-large for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague, where he wrote about the politics and cultures of the twenty-one countries in the news company’s broadcast region, including the First Libyan Civil War, a fraudulent presidential election in Belarus, and revolution and ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan.
Kirchick began his professional journalism career at The New Republic, where he wrote about domestic politics, lobbying, intelligence, foreign policy, and exposed former presidential candidate Ron Paul’s extremist newsletters. Recognized for his voice on American gay politics and international gay rights, he is a recipient of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Journalist of the Year Award. He is a professional member of the PEN American Center, sits on the advisory boards of the Vandenberg Coalition, the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, and the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, and has contributed essays to the collections Fight for Liberty: Defending Democracy in the Age of Trump and New Threats to Freedom.
Kirchick has spoken at colleges and universities across the United States and at venues around the world including the Oslo Freedom Forum, the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, the Stockholm Free World Forum, the American Library in Paris, the Warsaw Security Forum, the Lennart Meri Conference, and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Kirchick is a graduate of the Roxbury Latin School and Yale College.