Venise Wagner has been a professor of journalism at San Francisco State University since 2001. Before her appointment, she worked 12 years as a journalist for a variety of California daily newspapers covering border issues, religion and ethics, education, and the Bay Area’s Black communities. She is the co-author and co-editor of Reporting Inequality: Tools and Methods for Covering Race and Ethnicity. She is currently working on a family memoir entitled Anatomy of My Past about five generations of her family, from slavery in Arkansas to the steel mills in Chicago.