LynNell Hancock

LynNell Hancock is a reporter and writer specializing in education and child and family policy issues, who has taught journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism since 1993. She is the director of the Spencer Fellowship for Education Journalism, a program that supports the work of mid-career journalists to study at Columbia and produce significant works of journalism on education topics. In addition to contributing to Newsweek, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, and The New York Times, she served on staff of The Village Voice, the New York Daily News, and Newsweek where she covered national and local education issues. She has served on the National Advisory Board of Journalism Fellowships in Child and Family Policy and Columbia University’s Institute for Child and Family Policy. Hancock was appointed Visiting Professor at Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in the spring of 2018 where she will teach journalism and research a project on education inequality in Paris’ suburbs. Hancock is the author of Hands to Work: The Stories of Three Families Racing the Welfare Clock (2002) and contributed to America’s Mayor (2005) and The Public Assault on America’s Children: Poverty, Violence and Juvenile Injustice (2000). Her most recent Nation story in a series on the life and death of a desegregated town in the Delta won first prize in the Education Writers Association national magazine feature category. She holds an M.A. in East Languages and literature and an M.S. in Journalism, both from Columbia. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey with sportswriter husband, Filip Bondy, two grown children, and soon-to-be three grandchildren all nearby. She’s a lot more fun than she sounds on paper. Last updated July 2017