C. Zawadi Morris is an award-winning journalist and a Chicago native who moved to Brooklyn in 1997. Ms. Morris holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration (and a minor in Spanish) from the University of Illinois and a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.
She has worked as the bilingual communications director for Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez (NY-12), a senior account executive for Shandwick Public Affairs and Cohn & Wolf Public Relations, and a news editor at AOL’s Bed-Stuy Patch. In December 2013, under The Original Media Group, Zawadi launched The Brooklyn Reader, an online news source covering the neighborhoods of Central Brooklyn.
BK Reader has since been featured in Crain’s NY Business in 2018, The New York Times in 2019; and received the 2022 Brooklyn NAACP Community Service Award during its centennial celebration. Zawadi is the founder and president of the New York City Association of Local and Ethnic Media (NYCALEM); and is a board member of the Center for Black Literature.
In 2020, with grant support from The Pulitzer Center, National Geographic Society and the American Medical Association, Zawadi executive produced The COVID-19 Writers Project, a multimedia project documenting the devastation, resilience and recovery of those in Central Brooklyn impacted heavily by the 2020 pandemic. The COVID-19 Writers Project is now featured on The Pulitzer Center’s website and was presented at the U.S. Library of Congress in 2023.
