Linda Villarosa is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, where she covers race, inequality and health. For several years, she edited the health pages for The New York Times, working on health coverage for Science Times and for the newspaper at large. She was also the executive editor of Essence Magazine. She is the author or co-author of three books and teaches reporting, writing and Black Studies at The City College of New York in Harlem. She has trained journalists from around the world to better cover the HIV/AIDS epidemic at the International AIDS conferences in Barcelona, Bangkok, Toronto, Mexico City, Vienna, Melbourne and Durban.
Her 2018 cover story, “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis,” was nominated for a National Magazine Award. Her 2017 article, “America’s Hidden HIV Epidemic,” won an NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists Excellence in Journalism Award. Her essay on medical myths was included in the New York Times’s 1619 Project in August 2019. Most recently, she covered the toll COVID-19 has taken on black communities in America and the environmental justice movement in Philadelphia.
She has won awards from Lambda Literary Foundation, The American Medical Writers’ Association, The Arthur Ashe Institute, Lincoln University, the New York Association of Black Journalists, the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center.