Kristal Brent Zook

Kristal Brent Zook, PhD, is an award-winning journalist who had dedicated her career to producing outstanding investigative journalism and original insights on the topics of race, gender, labor, and popular culture in America.

As the biracial child of an African American mother and a caucasian father, one of Zook’s greatest strengths is her point of view and the fact that she is able to see, based on her experiences and vast knowledge of multiple cultures, from the perspective of one who lives in multiple worlds, as a minority within a minority. In her earliest work as a cultural reporter and television and film essayist for The Village Voice and LA Weekly, Zook chronicled internal struggles behind the scenes of the first primetime television shows ever to be produced, written, and directed by African Americans. While programs from an earlier era, such as Good Times and The Jeffersons, offered up black actors in front of the camera, Zook foresaw an important trend beginning in the 1980s and 1990s with network executives finally allowing African Americans to have unprecedented decision making and creative control over their cultural productions. This power led to mixed but fascinating results as she shows in her first book, Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television.

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