Jefferson Morley
bio
Follow me on:
Salon
I was born in New York City on May 8, 1958, the third of four children born to Anthony Morley and Jane Augustine.
My parents moved to St. Louis when I was a baby. I attended the Webster College Experimental School in Webster Groves. When I was ten years old, we moved back to New York City where I attended P.S. 61 and learned poetry from the late Kenneth Koch, an experience that I wrote about for the Village Voice. When I was 14, my parents divorced and I moved with my father to Minneapolis where I attended Marshall-University High School and played on the basketball team, which won the 1976 Class A championship. I went to college at Yale where I majored in American History.
My journalism career began with internships at Metropolis, a weekly newspaper in Minneapolis: the Worthington Daily Globe; the Minneapolis Tribune, the Washington Post, and Foreign Policy magazine. In 1983, I landed my first full-time permanent job in journalism when Michael Kinsley hired me at Harpers. I followed Kinsley to the New Republic, where I wrote, "I Was a Contra for the CIA," the the first definitive expose of the Agency's covert role in supporting Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries in violation of a congressional prohibition. In 1987, I became Washington correspondent for the Nation, where I covered the Iran-contra scandal and the War on Drugs. After a brief stint writing about music and politics for Spin, I returned to the Post in 1992 as an assistant editor in Jodie Allen's Outlook Section, I spent eight years at the Post, also working in the Metro and Style sections. In 2000 I moved to washingtonpost.com as World News Editor and as a columnist writing the World Opinion Roundup.
In 2007 I left the Post to become editorial director of the non-profit Center for Independent Media (CIM), a network of six online news sites, including the Washington Independent, Iowa Independent, Michigan Messenger, Minnesota Independent, Colorado Independent, and New Mexico Independent.
In 2008, I published Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, which was based on an 1996 article that I wrote for the Post Style section. After leaving CIM in 2009, I wrote Snow-Storm in August: Race and Unrest in Washington City 1835, which was based on a 2005 article that I wrote for the Post Sunday magazine. Snow-Storm in August was published by Nan Talese/Doubleday in July 2012.
I have taught at Boston University, Georgetown University, and the District of Columbia public schools.
I live in Washington, DC with my wife Teresa Arene.
