Jesse Holland Biography
Jesse James Holland is an American journalist, novelist, TV personality, and educator. He was one of the first African American journalists to be assigned full-time coverage of the Supreme Court, as well as the second African American editor of The Daily Mississippian, the University of Mississippi’s college newspaper.
Jesse Holland Age
Jesse was born Jesse James Holland Jr. on June 28, 1971, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, United States of America. He is 52 years old as of June 2023.
Jesse Holland Education
Holland graduated from the University of Mississippi with a bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts with an emphasis on journalism and English in May 1994. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, in 2012.
Jesse Holland Family
Holland Jr. is a Memphis, Tennessee, native and one of four siblings. He was raised in the Orange Mound district of Memphis, which was the country’s first African American neighborhood. His parents, Jesse James Holland and Yvonne Boga Holland, were public school teachers in Memphis, Tennessee, and Mount Pleasant, Mississippi, respectively, as well as proprietors and operators of a family farm in Marshall and Benton counties, Mississippi.
Jesse Holland Career
As an undergraduate, he worked as a reporter for The Oxford Eagle and as a reporter, editor, and eventually editor-in-chief of The Daily Mississippian, the University of Mississippi’s collegiate newspaper. He was the collegiate newspaper’s second black editor, and he also co-wrote the comic strip Hippie and The Black Guy. Holland was a long-time Associated Press reporter who began as an intern in the Columbia, South Carolina bureau in 1994, following internships at the Meredith Corporation, the Birmingham Post-Herald, and The New York Times. He soon became a legal reporter for the AP, covering the high-profile Susan Smith trial in Union, South Carolina for the news cooperative.
He then became a statehouse reporter, covering South Carolina’s governors, including Carroll Campbell, David Beasley, and Jim Hodges. In 1999, he went to the Albany, New York bureau, where he covered education, state government, Governor George Pataki, and Hillary Clinton’s maiden Senate campaign. He was an Associated Press Race & Ethnicity reporter in Washington, D.C., where he has been since 2000. Holland is one of the few Washington, D.C. reporters who has been accredited to cover all three houses of government: he was a Congressional reporter in 2000 and 2001-05, a White House correspondent from 2000 to 2001, and a Supreme Court reporter between 2009 and 2014.
He also worked as the Associated Press’s National Labor Writer from 2007 to 2009. Holland departed the Associated Press in September 2019 to become a Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Residence at the Library of Congress’ John W. Kluge Center. In 2016, he was named the Visiting Distinguished Professor of Journalism Ethics at the University of Arkansas. He now teaches creative nonfiction and multimedia narrative at Goucher College, having previously taught journalism ethics at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and New York University’s Washington, D.C. campus.
Jesse Holland Books
Holland left the AP in 2005 to write his first book, Black Men Built The Capitol: Discovering African American History In and Around Washington, D.C., which was released in 2007. His second book, The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House, was published in 2017 and received the Independent Publishers Association’s silver medal in U.S. history. Holland is also the author of the 2016 young adult novel Star Wars: The Force Awakens – Finn’s Story, on Finn, a character played by John Boyega in the Star Wars films.
Jesse Holland Net Worth
Jesse has an estimated net worth of 1 million dollars.