Albert Samaha is an award-winning journalist at the Washington Post and author of two books. Concepcion was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2021. Never Ran, Never Will was winner of the New York Society Library’s 2018 Hornblower Award, a finalist for the 2019 PEN/ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award, and adapted into the Netflix docuseries We Are: The Brooklyn Saints. He has received a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant and a New America Fellowship.

His reporting on a Bronx murder helped get a wrongfully convicted man freed from prison, his reporting on a teenager who said two NYPD detectives raped her led Congress and six states to pass bills reforming police sexual misconduct laws, his reporting on a narcotics unit in Mississippi led to a police captain’s resignation, and his reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to at least a dozen companies implementing additional safety protocols for food and service workers. His story on why Filipinos turned to an authoritarian president was selected into The Best American Travel Writing 2018. His story on people who steal to make ends meet in San Francisco was a finalist for a 2022 Livingston Award.

He won an Emerging Writer Award at the 2014 Mayborn Literary Non-Fiction Conference, and his work has won awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, the National Education Writers Association, the National Association of Black Journalists, and the California Newspaper Publishers Association.

Samaha spent eight years at BuzzFeed News, where he was a national criminal justice reporter, a global investigative reporter, a senior culture writer, and inequality editor. Before that, he was a staff writer at the Village Voice, San Francisco Weekly, and the Riverfront Times in St. Louis. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and the Paris Review, and he has performed on the Pop-Up Magazine live storytelling tour. He is the editor of the Sunday Long Read’s True Crime Newsletter. He earned his Master’s at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he has since worked as an adjunct professor, and he completed his undergrad studies at the University of San Diego, where he played football. Originally from northern California, he lives in Brooklyn.