Brett Sokol is a journalist based in Miami Beach whose writing on cultural issues has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Miami Herald, The New York Observer, New York magazine, The Awl, Slate, and not least, Boy's Life. For links to published work, see Journalism.
Raised in New York, he received a B.A. in History from Wesleyan University in Connecticut and a M.A. in History from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. While completing his masters thesis on the lesser-known Midwest chapters of the Weather Underground, he also worked as a senior writer at the Cleveland Free Times. There he covered the cultural waterfront, from the then-burgeoning local militia movement to the emergence of Rust Belt Chic. His features on the underground music scene were named Best Arts Criticism by the Press Club of Cleveland’s All Ohio Excellence in Journalism Awards.
Since 1999 he has lived in Miami Beach, where his writing on Miami's over-the-top cultural whirl -- as well as its equally colorful political drama -- has continued to win awards. His chronicling of the city's art world, from its sleepy pre-Art Basel stirrings to its current international attention, was a winner of the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation's Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism. His writing on Miami's cultural scene was named Best Criticism by the Society of Professional Journalists’ Green Eyeshade Awards, while a series of dispatches from Havana, Cuba were named Best Foreign Reporting. He also won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi award for Arts/Entertainment Journalism for reporting that led to an F.B.I. probe and the firing of the Orlando Museum of Art’s director after it displayed 25 Basquiat paintings of disputed authenticity.
Sokol is writing a book about the art world, “The Basquiat Hustle,” for the Simon & Schuster imprint One Signal. He has also been featured as an expert commentator on a variety of media outlets, including ABC-TV’s World News Tonight, National Public Radio, and Britain’s BBC. Additionally, he has served as a frequent emcee for the annual Miami Book Fair, conducting onstage interviews before a live audience with literary figures from Kurt Andersen and Dexter Filkins to Iggy Pop and John Waters.
He has also done extensive consulting work for nonprofit arts organizations, including Brooklyn's ArtPlace America and Miami's Knight Foundation. His report for the Knight Foundation on their funding of the O, Miami annual poetry festival is online; a comprehensive look at the over $100 million in arts funding which Knight has distributed since 2008 is also online.
Sokol is also the co-founder and editor of Letter16 Press, a non-profit publishing house focused on the sweet spot between photojournalism and art.
Email: BrettSokol@yahoo.com