Cooper briefed National Press Foundation fellows in March 2022: Leading With Lived Experience.

Kenneth J. Cooper is a senior editor at GBH News, an NPR and PBS station in Boston. He is a member of the newsroom’s leadership team and directs radio and digital coverage of education and the city’s majority-minority neighborhoods.

Cooper has been a journalist for four more than decades, specializing in government, politics and social policy, at the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Knight Ridder, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Louis American. In 1984, Cooper, then 28, shared a Pulitzer for special local reporting for “The Race Factor,” a Boston Globe series that examined institutional racism in Boston. For at least 30 years, he was the youngest African American named as a recipient of a Pulitzer for journalism, and possibly the youngest African American to win the prize in any category.

Cooper covered the nation’s capital for a dozen years, reporting on the presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis, welfare reform and health policy for the former Knight-Ridder newspaper group. For the Washington Post, he covered education policy and Congress, including the “Republican revolution” that took control of Congress is 1994. He also wrote a monthly column on Washington, “Capital Scene,” for Emerge magazine.

From 1996 to 1999, he was the Post’s correspondent for South Asia, reporting on India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives from his base in New Delhi. In his second stint at the Boston Globe, he was its National Editor from 2001 through 2005. Cooper is both an award judge and a board member for the National Press Foundation.