About Victor

I’ve been a writer from jump, since my kindergarten days tooling around on my parents’ old typewriter. For elementary school show and tell, I’d write parodies of The Magic School Bus and replace all the kids in Ms. Frizzle’s class with my friends. When I went to college at the University of Alabama, however, I realized that journalism was a way to tell real-life stories that could be just as captivating as fictional ones.

At Alabama I joined the school newspaper, The Crimson White, before I even stepped foot in a classroom. I eventually became editor-in-chief of the publication, the second-ever black person to serve in the role. We covered issues ranging from entrenched racism in the Greek system to corrupt politics in student government. The most challenging assignment was grappling with a devastating tornado that ravaged our city and a wide swath of the state in 2011. It was the first time I and many of my friends were forced to make sense of a tragedy.

After college I worked for seven years as a technology and business reporter at Time magazine and later at the media startup The Ringer. I interviewed executives at Facebook, Google, and Lyft. More importantly, I examined the ways their products were transforming the world, from Airbnb gentrifying neighborhoods to Facebook warping social discourse through the creation of the Like button. I even wrote an article calculating the happiest day on the Internet.

But I never really loved writing about companies or the digital spaces they dominated; I preferred writing about real people. In particular I was always looking for more chances to tell black people’s stories, especially in ways I wasn’t seeing in other forms of media. In 2019 I quit my job at The Ringer and moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma to pursue a book project about Tulsa’s Greenwood District and the impacts of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. That project became Built From the Fire, which follows several families’ stories from before 1921 all the way to the present day in Greenwood.

Built From the Fire was named a top book of the year in 2023 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. It was embraced by so many of the people who allowed me to tell a bit of their story in the book’s pages, and the wider Greenwood community who saw themselves in the streetscapes I recreated. I’ve been a writer for just about thirty years now, since my kindergarten typewriter days, and this is without question the most significant thing I’ve ever produced.

Looking forward, I want to keep telling black stories that have been left out of school textbooks and Hollywood production lineups. Our history is so much richer than it’s given credit for, and it’s a privilege to be able to bring some of those stories out into the light in the present day.