Mark Potok

As director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project and editor of its award-winning Intelligence Report magazine, Mark Potok leads one of the most highly regarded operations monitoring the extreme right in the world today. In addition to editing the magazine, Potok acts as a key spokesman for the SPLC, a well-known civil rights organization based in Alabama, and has testified before the Senate, the U.N. High Commission on Human Rights and in other venues. Before coming to SPLC in 1997, Potok spent almost 20 years as an award-winning reporter at newspapers including USA Today, the Dallas Times Herald and the Miami Herald. While at USA Today, he covered the 1993 siege in Waco, the rise of militias, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the trial of Timothy McVeigh. In 1996, his editors nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize for a package of stories on racism in Texas public housing. In his current position, Potok is regularly quoted by major media, scholars and book authors in both the United States and abroad.