Let’s meet SAH

Sylvia A. Harvey, also known as SAH, is an award-winning journalist, speaker, and author of The Shadow System: Mass Incarceration and the American Family (Bold Type Books, 2020). Her work on race, class, policy, and incarceration has appeared in The Nation, Elle, Politico, Vox, The Marshall Project, The Root, and more. NPR, WBAI, Embodied WUNC, Cheddar News, and others, have featured her commentary on the criminal legal system. SAH is a dynamic speaker, known to light up any conference, university, or corporate stage with her fierce storytelling. Her work is being used in university coursework and has been cited by federal lawmakers calling for criminal justice reform. 

SAH’s research and reporting investigate the way culture, politics, history, public health, policy, and economics affect our lives. She focuses on how some of our most important social institutions – the criminal legal system, the child welfare system, and the education system – exacerbate the collateral effects of mass incarceration on families and communities. The Oakland native earned a BA in sociology from Columbia University, where her research experience advanced her commitment to understanding inequality, and fueled her desire to communicate her work beyond the academy. Leveraging her sociological training to examine social inequalities, she subsequently pursued graduate training in journalism at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Her work has been supported by grants, fellowships, and journalist appointments from Type Media Center, the Logan Nonfiction Program at the Carey Institute for Global Good, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Poynter Institute, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. She is a 2023 awardee of the Data-Driven Reporting Project, a partnership between Medill and the Google News Initiative. SAH is the recipient of a National Headliner Award and a National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Salute to Excellence award. Her book, The Shadow System, was a finalist for the Media for a Just Society Awards. SAH lives in New York City. 

You can connect with her on social media @Ms_SAH