Isaiah J. Poole in 2017 attending a town hall featuring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the CNN Washington studios.
I am a writer, editor and online content producer with extensive experience writing about politics, economics and the struggles of America’s left out and left behind. With the creation of Poole.media in 2018, I am realizing my vision of a company that provides content creation and communications strategy for nonprofit organizations and companies working toward a world of equity, justice and inclusion.
Poole.media is the culmination of a lifetime of work in journalism and social change – work that included covering a presidential campaign, launching a chain of weekly newspapers, leading media diversity efforts, engaging in advocacy for people living with HIV — and reviewing a Frank Sinatra concert. In every job I’ve chosen, I’ve been able to use my communications skills to educate, infuriate and, I hope, leave the world a little more enlightened and compassionate.
Before launching Poole.media I was the communications director of People’s Action, a federation of grassroots activist organizations in 30 states. People’s Action in 2016 absorbed the Campaign for America’s Future, where for a decade I edited the commentary website OurFuture.org, managed much of the organization’s digital communications and created many of the organization’s research reports. At both the Campaign for America’s Future and People’s Action, I played multiple roles – as a manager, a writer, an editor, a designer (print and online), a multimedia producer and a strategist.
My career in journalism included work as a senior reporter at Congressional Quarterly; the opinion page editor for the Centre Daily Times in State College, Pa. while simultaneously completing work on my undergraduate degree in journalism; and the managing editor for the Prince George’s County editions of The Gazette, where I helped establish a string of weekly newspapers with a combined circulation of nearly a quarter-million readers.
While a young Washington correspondent for Black Enterprise magazine in the early 1980s, I helped launch the Washington Association of Black Journalists, which later became a chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists. Later, while working as a national political reporter at The Washington Times, I contributed to an American Society of Newspaper Editors study on the coverage of LGBT people in the news media that led to the creation of the National Gay and Lesbian Journalism Association.
I interrupted my journalism career in 1991 to work for a year with a nonprofit AIDS education organization in Washington. There I got an insider’s view of the challenges the nonprofit sector faces as well as the severity of the AIDS crisis, and won an award from my journalism peers for my education efforts.
I am a native Washingtonian now living in the city’s Brookland neighborhood. I am married (to Paul Crego, a Syracuse, N.Y.-area native who works as a cataloguer at the Library of Congress and who played an early key role in advancing marriage equality in the Syracuse area in the early 1980s.), With the support of Paul and our two cats, Tina and Ketevan, I am looking forward to using Poole.media to both inform and transform.
NOTE: In 2023, Isaiah J. Poole’s legal name was changed to Isaiah Jerome Lewis Poole. Find out why.
Featured in The Washington Blade
Paul Crego (left) and Isaiah J. Poole at their July 2010 wedding.
Learn more about me and my husband Paul in this 2019 profile in The Washington Blade. The article, written as part of the paper’s 50th anniversary celebration, takes about how we met through the paper’s once-popular print personals ads.
» See print version.
