Ko Bragg

Ko Bragg is a writer and editor focused on the historical evolution of the American South.

Her recent writing blends investigative journalism, oral history, and first-person narrative to tell stories grounded in Mississippi’s fraught history. For The Atlantic, she explored the fight that aging Black tour guides, including her stepdad, have been waging to keep public memory alive in her adopted hometown of Philadelphia, Mississippi. The town was the site of the “Mississippi Burning” murders of three civil rights workers during Freedom Summer 1964.

In “The Lynching That Sent My Family North,” also featured in The Atlantic, she reported on how her family reckons with a tragedy that generations of silence and shell shock nearly buried forever. More than a century later, she launched her journalism career at an alt-weekly in Jackson, Mississippi, in the very county where a lynch mob took her great-great-grand uncle’s life.

As an editor, she commissions stories on a breadth of topics from environmental justice to cultural analysis. At Scalawag, she runs the “pop justice” vertical she developed to grapple with how popular culture and media warp our understanding of justice. Ko is currently the Managing Editor of The Margin, a nonprofit outlet centering the people and places most affected by environmental injustice in the U.S. She’s also reported for Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, The 19th, Frontline, Columbia Journalism Review, and more.

She lives in New Orleans with her goddaughter, but they both consider Mississippi home.

Website: keaux.com