Conversations in Craft and Content: Caleb Gayle

Arizona State University presents "Conversations in Craft and Content," a creative writing lecture series hosted and moderated by Mitchell Jackson, Guggenheim fellow, Pulitzer winner, and the John O. Whiteman Dean's Distinguished Professor of English at ASU.

The series brings lauded writers to ASU for lectures on the ideas in their work, as well as their writing and revision process and the philosophies that guide them. This fall, we welcome journalist Caleb Gayle on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, at 5 p.m.

The free, public event takes place in person at ASU's First Amendment Forum in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (second floor) in downtown Phoenix.

About the guest

Caleb Gayle is an award-winning journalist and the author of "We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power." His most recent work, "Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State," published by Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House in 2025, has been long-listed for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. A professor at Northeastern University, he is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, and his work also has appeared in The Atlantic, TIME, The Guardian, Guernica, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe. He lives near Boston.

About the moderator

Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. Jackson’s debut novel "The Residue Years" received wide critical praise and won a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His other honors include fellowships, grants and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Center for Fiction. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Time, Esquire and Marie Claire, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar and elsewhere.

Jackson’s nonfiction book "Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family" was published in 2019 and named a best book of the year by 15 publications, including NPR, Time, The Paris Review, The Root, Kirkus Reviews and Buzzfeed. His next novel "John of Watts" will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Jackson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and covers race and culture as the first Black columnist in the history of Esquire. His most recent book is "Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion," a coffee-table book on NBA style, published in 2023. He is the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at ASU.

Conversations in Craft and Content is supported by the ASU's Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and Department of English.