Alexis Clark

Alexis Clark is an author and freelance journalist who writes about race, culture, and politics during World War II and the Civil Rights era. A contributing writer for History.com and correspondent for Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien, she covers historical and contemporary issues including poverty, food insecurity, and racial justice.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, including the “Beyond the World War II We Know” and “Past Tense” series. She is the author of Enemies in Love (The New Press, 2018), a narrative nonfiction book featured by The New Yorker, NPR, and PBS, and currently in development as a TV series.

A former senior editor at Town & Country, Clark has also written for Smithsonian.com, NBC News Digital, and Preservation Magazine. She’s received Ford Foundation support for her WWII research and is under contract with Penguin Random House for a book on Black sororities and their fight for equality. A Dallas native, she holds degrees from Columbia Journalism School, the University of Virginia, and Spelman College.

In Paris, Clark will expand her research on the experiences of African American World War II soldiers, focusing especially on mixed-race children known as “Brown Babies” fathered by Black G.I.s and white European women in France. Building on her reporting about Germany’s Brown Babies and Black veterans’ struggles with segregation and denied benefits, she will explore French archives and connect with WWII scholars to deepen understanding of these overlooked histories.