Michael Powell

Michael Powell is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Previously, he was a national reporter at The New York Times, where he covered issues around free speech and expression. He also covered presidential campaigns, wrote the "Gotham" column for the Metro section, and for six years was the "Sports of the Times" columnist which included acclaimed reporting through a series of articles chronicling basketball and long-distance running on the Navajo Nation which later served as the basis for his book.

In 2013 he and two colleagues won the George Polk Award for reporting on a corrupt police detective—stories that led to more than a dozen exonerations, including freeing a man who had served 22 years for a murder he did not commit—and he was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking-news reporting on Eliot Spitzer. Before joining the Times, Powell worked for The Washington Post, where he covered the 2000 presidential campaign and later served as New York bureau chief.

His first book “Canyon Dreams": A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation” received critical acclaim and inspired a Netflix film produced by LeBron James and directed by Sydney Freeland.