TRYMAINE LEE is a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning journalist, author, and MSNBC contributor. He is the host of the Into America podcast, where he explores the intersections of race, power, and politics.

For more than two decades, Trymaine has been at the forefront of America’s defining stories—covering natural disasters, racial justice uprisings, and the ongoing struggle for true democracy and equality. He is widely credited as the first national journalist to report on the shooting of Trayvon Martin, a story that helped ignite a nationwide movement. As a national correspondent at MSNBC, he led coverage of the killing of Michael Brown Jr. and the Ferguson uprising that followed, further cementing his role as a leading voice on race and justice in America.

Trymaine has been reporter and host for multiple documentaries and television specials, including Stone Ghosts of the South: Confederate Monuments and America’s Battle with Itself, Can You Hear Us Now (a series launched in the wake of George Floyd’s murder), Lift Every Voice: Celebrating Black Culture, Into America: Power of the Black Vote, and Black Men in America: the Road to 2024.

A contributing writer to the acclaimed The 1619 Project, he is also a Webby Award winner for his podcast series on Reconstruction’s unfulfilled promises, a four-time Signal Award winner, and a recipient of the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Blood on Black Wall Street: The Legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre, his documentary on the lingering impacts of the massacre 100 years later. His work has earned multiple NABJ Salute to Excellence Awards, four NAACP Image Award nominations, and recognition as Adweek’s Podcast Host of the Year. In 2018, he won an Emmy for his reporting on gun violence in Chicago. Trymaine was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 as part of The Times-Picayune team covering Hurricane Katrina. 

A former fellow at New America and the Harvard Institute of Politics, he has been named to The Root 100 and Ebony Power 100 lists of the most influential African Americans. He’s previously reported for The Philadelphia Tribune, The Trentonian, Huffington Post and The New York Times.

A Thousand Ways to Die is his first book.