Chiké Frankie Edozien began his journalism career reading the news bulletins at the Nigerian boarding school Federal Government College, Port Harcourt from 1981-1986. While studying for a journalism degree in New York, he was part of the BET News team that covered the 1992 Democratic National convention that culminated in Bill Clinton’s nomination for president of the United States.
A stint at ABC News soon followed and by the end of 1993 Edozien was hired at the New York Post, where he remained for 15 years and garnered several reporting awards. At the Post, Edozien’s coverage of the aftermath of the shooting death of Amadou Diallo was critically acclaimed. As was his coverage of HIV/AIDS and healthcare disparities in communities around the Big Apple. He was its City Hall Reporter from 1999-2008 and was the lead writer on legislative affairs.
In 2008 he exposed a decades long secretive slush fund scheme that resulted in reforming the way the City Council doled out taxpayer funds and a federal investigation that saw several lawmakers jailed.
He covered crime, courts, labor issues and human services public health and politics, reporting from around the country and abroad for the paper. In 2001, he co-founded the AFRican Magazine and continues to serve as the editor-in-chief. He has traveled around the world reporting on the impact of HIV/AIDS particularly among Africans and is a 2008 Kaiser Foundation fellow for Global Health Reporting.
The result of that fellowship was a critical look at slice of healthcare outcomes in Uganda and how the rest of sub-Saharan Africa was learning from them. Edozien fully embraced digital platforms for doing journalism and was a founding blogger of the New York Times hyper-local Fort Greene blog. And routinely contributed international news and analysis to ‘Rendezvous’ the digital portal of the International Herald Tribune (now the International New York Times). The AFRican Magazine has had a digital component since its inception.
He has been published in several outlets including Time Magazine, Atlas Obscura, The Hollywood Reporter, Global Post, The New Black Magazine, The Advocate, Vibe, City Limits, Blackaids.org, New York Amsterdam News, WorldPress, Colorlines, Out Traveler, Transitions Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, and the Inbiza Journal for African Writing among others. A sometime broadcaster, he has appeared several times on MSNBC and CBS giving context on issues affecting African countries. Edozien was also a regular contributor to the Arise America news show on Arise TV. He provided context and analysis for the ‘Across Africa’ segment on the weekday broadcast. His work has also been showcased on Netflix and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
Edozien joined full time faculty at New York University as a clinical associate professor in 2008. Between 2008-2019, he was the faculty director of Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute’s ‘Reporting Africa’ program, a unique summer intensive and immersion journalism program run out of Accra, Ghana that he developed — from the curriculum to onsite digital publishing. Many of the program’s alumni have gone on to work as full time journalists and even returned to Africa after this first taste on international journalism.
By 2017 he was awarded the university’s prestigious Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Faculty award for excellence in teaching, leadership, social justice, and community building. In 2020, Edozien assumed the leadership of NYU’s Africa campus as the Global Site Director of New York University Accra. He was worked to significantly increase enrollment and created multiple pathways for undergraduates to study in Ghana as well as convening conferences in Ghana for scholars to center Africa in their research. He founded and curates the popular ‘Labone Dialogues by NYU Accra’ public lecture and masterclass series. The dialogues have received thousands of dollars in external grants from the U.S. State Department, the Windham-Campbell Prize, among others.
In 2023, he corralled thirty of Africa’s most acclaimed writers to come to Ghana for a three-day symposium of literature. The event saw Ghanaian readers and writers interact with a Nobel prize winner, a Pulitzer prize winner, and numerous authors, resulting in the sale of thousands of books.
Prof. Edozien is also the author of ‘Lives of Great Men (Team Angelica 2017) which won the 2018 Lambda Literary prize for Best Gay Memoir/Biography. Lives’ was shortlisted for the 2018 Gerald Kraak Award for gender sexuality and human rights writing and for the Randy Shilts Nonfiction prize for the Publishing Triangle. It also received the Gay City News Impact Award in 2018. His work has also appeared in several anthologies including As You Like It (Jacana Media 2018) a winner 2019 Lambda Literary Award Best LGBTQ Anthology; The Heart of The Matter (Jacana Media 2019); Queer Africa (New Internationalist 2018); Safe House: Explorations in Creative nonfiction (Dundurn/Cassava Republic Press 2016) and Relations: An Anthology of African & Diaspora Voices (HarperVia 2023).
