Master’s Tea
About Brent Staples
Brent Staples writes about politics and culture for the New York Times editorial board. He was appointed to the board in 1990, after serving three years as an assistant metropolitan editor and two years as an editor of The New York Times Book Review. He came to The Times in 1985 from The Chicago Sun-Times, where he was a science reporter. In Chicago, he contributed regularly to the Chicago Reader and wrote extensively about jazz for a variety of publications, including Downbeat Magazine
Since arriving at The Times, Mr. Staples has been a frequent contributor to the Times magazine and the Book Review. His essays are widely syndicated and have been collected in scores of college readers, making him required reading in college English and composition classes throughout the United States and abroad. He is the author of “Parallel Time,” a memoir published by Pantheon in January 1994, which was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, previously won by the novelists Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin and the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. “Parallel Time” was also a subject of a 1997 ABC television documentary entitled: “The Dignity of Children.”
In the spring of 2006, Mr. Staples was awarded a Fletcher Foundation Fellowship for his book-in-progress, “Neither White Nor Black: The Secret History of Mixed-Race America.” The Fletcher Fellowship, a $50,000 grant given to organizations and individuals, is administered by the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African-American Research at Harvard and supports work that advances the cause of racial equality. Mr. Staples has lectured widely at colleges, universities and other venues across the country. He served as a visiting fellow at the University of Chicago in 2004 and the Hoover Institution in 2003. In 2001, he was chosen by Harvard University to give the annual W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures, a three-day series that recognizes “persons of outstanding achievement who have contributed to our better understanding of African-American life, history and culture.”
Born on Sept. 13, 1951, in Chester, Pa., Mr. Staples received a B.A. degree in behavioral science from Widener University, Chester, Pa., in 1973. He received a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Chicago in 1976 and earned a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago in 1982. Mr. Staples held two doctoral fellowships, one from the Danforth Foundation and another from the Ford Foundation. He taught briefly at the university level before entering journalism.
Mr. Staples and his wife live in Brooklyn.