Isma'il Kushkush is a journalist who has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, Guernica, Smithsonian, The Nation, the Associated Press and others. He was based in Khartoum, Sudan, for eight years, and for two seperate three-month periods he was acting bureau chief for the New York Times in East Africa based in Nairobi, Kenya. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and international relations from the University of California, Davis, with a focus on Africa and the Middle East, and a Master of Arts degree in journalism from Columbia Journalism School in New York, with a focus on politics and global affairs. He was a Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and an Ida B. Wells Fellowship recipient with Type Investigations.