Award-winning journalist to lecture on politics and community
Award-winning political journalist Dante Chinni will deliver a lecture at St. Olaf College April 18 titled American Fault Lines: Politics, Community, and the 2016 Election.
His talk, which will begin at 4 p.m. in Viking Theater, is free and open to the public. It will be streamed and archived online.
Based in Washington, D.C., Chinni has covered politics and the media for more than 15 years. He is the director of the American Communities project, a collaboration of The Wall Street Journal, PBS NewsHour, and WNYC radio that “correlates economic and demographic data to election results and consumer data to see how changes in technology and economics have redefined the social, political, and cultural fault lines” of the United States.
Chinni also writes the regular Politics Counts online column for The Wall Street Journal and is the creator of Patchwork Nation, which won a 2009 Knight Batten Award for journalistic innovation and is the focus of the book Our Patchwork Nation published in 2010.
A native of Detroit and a graduate of Michigan State University, Chinni has worked as a reporter-researcher at Newsweek and a senior associate at the Project for Excellence in Journalism. He has written for publications including The Economist, Columbia Journalism Review, and the Washington Post Magazine.
Chinni’s visit to St. Olaf is sponsored by Pi Sigma Alpha, the Political Science Honor Society, and St. Olaf’s Institute for Freedom and Community, which aims to foster intellectual inquiry and meaningful discussion of important political and social issues.