Jordan Michael Smith is a Contributing Editor at The New Republic. The author of a bestselling e-book about former President Jimmy Carter called Humanity, his writing has appeared in print and online for many publications, including the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Esquire, BBC, Globe and Mail, and MSNBC.
Jordan’s story on a series of murders in Australia won the 2021 award for Excellence in Feature Writing from The Association of LGBTQ Journalists. His look at a controversial program in Germany that aims to prevent child sexual abuse was listed as a “Notable Essay” in the 2022 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, and his profile of a professor studying sex offenders was selected for inclusion in the 2019 edition. His essay on antisemitism was a finalist for the inaugural Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing. He was a finalist for PEN America’s Writing For Justice Fellowship, short-listed for the MIT Technology Review Covid Inequality Fellowship, and twice a finalist for the Richard J. Margolis Award for social justice journalism. He has been awarded grants or fellowships from Type Investigations, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Solutions Journalism, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Two of his stories have been optioned for films.
Jordan has reviewed more than 125 books for the Boston Globe, Slate, The New Republic, the Globe and Mail, and many other outlets. Formerly a Contributing Writer for Salon and the Christian Science Monitor, he has appeared on many radio and television programs in Canada, the United States, Russia, and Iraq. He lives in Toronto with his dalmatian/basset hound mix, Penny.