About James Kirchick
James Kirchick is a contributing writer for the Atlantic, a writer at large for AIR MAIL, a columnist for Commentary, and author of the instant New York Times bestseller, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. He has reported from over 40 countries and his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Tablet, the New York Review of Books, New York, Rolling Stone, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Spectator, and the Times Literary Supplement, among many other publications across the United States and around the world.
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. Subsequently, 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. Among the many events he covered were the First Libyan Civil War, a stolen presidential election in Belarus, and revolution and ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan. His first book, “The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age,” was published by Yale University Press in 2017, and he has contributed essays to the collections Fight for Liberty: Defending Democracy in the Age of Trump and New Threats to Freedom.
Recognized as a leading voice on American gay politics and international gay rights, Kirchick is a recipient of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Journalist of the Year Award. He is a member of the Author’s Guild, an elected member of the Society of American Historians, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and has previously held fellowships at the Brookings Institution, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and the Robert Bosch Foundation in Berlin.
Kirchick has spoken at colleges and universities across the United States and at venues including the National Security Agency, the U.S. Department of State, the 92nd St. Y, the Oxford Union, 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 in Estonia, and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Berlin. He has appeared on Good Morning America, Real Time with Bill Maher, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, the BBC, France 24, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and NPR, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Kirchick is a graduate of the Roxbury Latin School and Yale College.
