Hey there! I’m Hannah Giorgis Yohannes, a journalist, cultural critic, and fiction writer based in New York.

From 2018 to 2025, I was a staff writer at The Atlantic. While there, I reported on subjects such as the history of Black television in the United States, the global significance of Barbados becoming a republic, and the expansive visions of African artists working across several disciplines. You can find all of my Atlantic writing—which also includes rom-com close reads, sports features, and interviews with authors, directors, and musicians—here.

Before my time at The Atlantic, I was the special projects editor at The Ringer, where I produced editorial packages like this in addition to editing pop-culture pieces and writing m y own. And prior to that, I wrote about culture and style for BuzzFeed/BuzzFeed News.

My criticism, essays, and reporting have also appeared in media outlets including Rolling Stone, the New York Times magazine, New Yorker, the LA Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, The Guardian, and Pitchfork, as well as books such as Black Futures and Lasagna: A Baked Pasta Cookbook, which featured the Ethiopian lasagna recipe I wrote for TASTE Cooking in 2018. More on my non-fiction writing here, here, and here.

You can find my fiction in publications including The Lifted Brow literary journal, SPOOK magazine, and Addis Ababa Noir, a collection of short stories set in Ethiopia’s capital city. My contribution to that anthology, titled "A Double-Edged Inheritance," was short-listed for the 2022 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. I’ve also consulted on and appeared in several film and TV projects, including docuseries on Black television history for HBO and CNN, and a short film about young women skaters in Ethiopia. And since 2022, I’ve been on the Board of Jurors for the George Foster Peabody Awards.

These days I'm working on some fun new things, including a community-archive project supported by the Mellon Foundation. And, of course, I’m still continuing to think (obsess, perhaps) about connections across the African diaspora. If you'd like to chat about that, or any other work, here's how to get in touch.

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