Ellis Cose is the author of a dozen books on issues of national and international concern, including the best-selling The Rage of a Privileged Class, a novel (The Best Defense), and is currently completing a memoir: Fighting to be Heard. A Chicago native, Cose hold a master’s degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy from George Washington University.
He began his career at the age of 19 with the Chicago Sun-Times, where he was a columnist, editor and national correspondent. He has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today (where he also served as an occasional columnist and member of the board of contributors) and a member of the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press. He’s been a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, a senior fellow and director of energy policy studies at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies, and a consultant to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
A longtime columnist and contributing editor for Newsweek magazine (1993 through 2010) and former chairman of the editorial board and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News, was he was also a senior fellow at the Center for Talent Innovation.
Cose is also an independent radio producer (Against the Odds, which he created and hosted, aired in 2008 in more than 100 radio markets in the United States, including eight stations in the top 11 markets, and He followed that up with a four-part series in 2009, which also aired in top radio markets across the United States) as well as a popular campus lecturer and public speaker.
Cose has appeared on The Today Show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC Evening News, Good Morning America, the PBS “Time to Choose” election special, Charlie Rose, CNN’s Talk Back Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He’s been interviewed for British, Brazilian and Canadian television. He was also a judge for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and gotten numerous journalism awards-including the University of Missouri medal for career excellence and distinguished service in journalism, two Clarion awards, and four National Association of Black Journalists first place awards. He was named the 2002 winner of the New York Association of Black Journalists’ lifetime achievement award, winner of the 2003 award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists as well as the winner of two New York Association of Black Journalists’ first place 2003 awards for commentary and magazine features. In 2004, he was named the first recipient of the newly inaugurated annual Vision Award from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. In 2006, He won a Unity award for commentary and also shared in a first place award from the Society of Professional Journalists. He also won the first place 2009 award for commentary from the New York Association of Black Journalists as well as the North Star Foundation’s distinguished journalist award for 2009.
Published Works
Cose’s most recent non-fiction book, The End of Anger, is a meditation on race, class and generational change, which incorporates research from his ground-breaking study on Harvard MBAs. It was published by the Ecco imprint of HarperCollins in June 2011, with the paperback edition published in May 2012. It is “a tremendously important book -gracefully done, painfully perceptive and, as always in his writing, fearless in its honesty about the ways that black and white Americans continue to be distanced from each other even at the topmost levels of success,” wrote Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities. Daily Kos, the popular website, proclaimed it, “most important book of 2011, hands down.” Diane McWhorter, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Carry Me Home, called it “the most authoritative accounting I’ve seen of where our country stands in its unending quest to resolve the racial dilemma on which it was founded.”
Cose’s Bone to Pick: On Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, was published by Atria (a Simon and Schuster imprint) in April 2004. The book is a wide-ranging look at a number of societies-the United States, Ghana, South Africa, East Timor, and Peru among them-and their ways of coping with cruelty and pain. The Washington Post had this to say: ” [C}omplex questions surrounding ‘forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation, and revenge’ Bone to Pick ranges over centuries of contested histories, across five continents, spinning individual tragedies in and out of collective traumas, seeking the nature of ‘forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values.’ The truth may be a prized (and politicized) commodity in the quest for social justice, but as Cose observes, quoting Czech novelist Milan Kundera, ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ Bone to Pick is a timely reminder of that axiom and a useful addition to the canon of that struggle.”
The Envy of the World, an in-depth essay on the state of black men in America, was published by Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) in 2002 and has appeared on several best-seller lists, including the Essence magazine list, where it was number one. Newsweek featured the book on its cover and National Public Radio produced a special a program based on it. Kirkus Reviews called The Envy of the World, “A slender volume with a substantial and significant message.” The Washington Post described it as “lucid, eloquent and deeply personal book.” The Chicago Tribune called its author “a gifted, rhapsodic essayist.” “Cose charts both an urgently argued history of black masculinity and a moving and nuanced snapshot of where it is now,” declared Publishers’ Weekly. The paperback edition was published in January 2003.
In May 2004 the Rockefeller Foundation issued Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education-a major report he authored on the legacy of the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and the current challenges facing American educators. The report was the basis of a Newsweek cover feature and for a David Broder column and other stories in the national press. In November 2006, the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC’s Annenberg School published Killing Affirmative Action: Would ending it really result in a better, more perfect Union? his report, featured in several newspaper and in Newsweek magazine, examined California’s 10-year experience living with Proposition 209, the measure that ended affirmative action in its public sector.
The Rage of a Privileged Class, Cose’s book-length essay on race in America, was published by HarperCollins in January 1994. It was featured as a Newsweek cover story and described by The New York Times Book Review as a “disciplined, graceful exposition of a neglected aspect of the subject of race in America.”
A Man’s World (published by HarperCollins in June 1995), was featured in a front page review in The New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post called it “a valuable, cogent and well-written contribution to an enormously complex subject.”
Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (published in January 1997 and also excerpted in Newsweek) explored America’s continuing obsession with race. The New York Times Book Review called it “a book this country desperately needs, one with genuine healing potential,” and included Color-Blind among its best book of the year recommendations for 1997.
He also edited an essay collection entitled The Darden Dilemma published by HarperCollins in March 1997.
His debut novel, The Best Defense, was published by HarperCollins in September 1998 (“a formidable first novel…crisp, fast-paced and engaging. In a genre glutted with lightweight fare, The Best Defense reaches higher”- The Seattle Times).
A Nation of Strangers, a history of American immigration, was published by William Morrow and Co. in 1992 and The Press was published by Morrow in 1989.
At the Institute for Journalism Education (at the University of California, Berkeley), Cose designed and directed a widely quoted study on journalism careers published by IJE: The Quiet Crisis: Minority Journalists and Newsroom Opportunity (1985). He also instituted and served as inaugural director of IJE’s Management Training Center at Northwestern University.
He wrote The Rebirth of Community Power, published by Westview Press in 1983. He also authored Energy and the Urban Crisis (1979) and was the editor of Energy and Equity: Some Social Concerns (1978), both published by the Joint Center for Political Studies.