David L. Wheeler
Independent Writer and Editor
My goal as a writer and editor is to convey complex topics in an accurate, clear, compelling way. I’ve traveled and worked in many countries, and have a global perspective.
My goal as a writer and editor is to convey complex topics in an accurate, clear, compelling way. I’ve traveled and worked in many countries, and have a global perspective.
I have organized events, spoken at conferences, taught journalism workshops, and reported articles from over 40 countries across Africa, Asia, the South Pacific and the Middle East.
My career began in New England newspapers, where my reporting won me a Vannevar Bush Fellowship at MIT for journalists interested in writing about science. I went on to The Chronicle of Higher Education, where I served as a senior writer, international editor, and managing editor. In 2012, I founded Al-Fanar Media, a bilingual publication that covered education, research and culture in the Arab world. I led that publication for nine years.
Professional Writing and Editing
Writing
Early in my career, I specialized in reporting about science and medicine. Over time, the subjects of my writing have expanded to include education, technology, the arts, and literature. I’m equally comfortable interviewing physicists or poets.
Virtual Reality Grows Up
Immersive technologies, such as virtual reality, have promised to allow users to explore everything from atoms to archaeological sites without ever having to leave a headset. I spoke to leaders in the field and wrote about how the educational use of these technologies is maturing (PDF).
Beating Writer’s Block
I offer some solutions to a problem that many writers, students, and professors complain about. I’ve always believed that writers’ block is the result of improper research—often too much or too little—and poor planning, rather than actually being an obstacle during writing itself.
Sudan Betrays Women—Again
In the summer of 2019, the political situation in Sudan looked hopeful. Street protests, led largely by young people, had toppled the regime of the long-time dictator, Omar al-Bashir. But women, who had felt free to escape social restrictions, return to the streets and join the protests, were excluded from a transitional council that was supposed to rule the country.
Documenting Genocide in Cambodia
Cambodia was one of the first countries where I did international reporting. In visits to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Documentation Center of Cambodia, I got a chilling look at the details of how political prisoners had been tortured to death.
Editing
An editor’s job is to be the reader’s friend. I focus on making the reader’s path through prose a smooth, interesting journey. Every word should carry its weight. I am experienced in all levels of editing, from helping writers plan articles to detailed copyediting.
Arab Women Are Left Out of University Leadership
I led an editorial team that surveyed 702 Arab higher education institutions and found that women led fewer than 7 percent of them. Nine Arab countries had no female academic leaders at all. This was the first time that the weak position of women in Arab academic leadership has been documented.
A Portrait of the Obstacles That Arab Researchers Face
With my colleagues at Al-Fanar Media, I conceived and edited five articles that drew a portrait of the difficult work environment that Arab researchers face. Ninety-one percent of researchers surveyed wanted to leave the country they were working in. The editorial package drew coverage in a wide variety of publications, including Science, Times Higher Education, Morocco World News, and SciDev (in Arabic).
Online Education in the Arab World Intensifies Inequality
A longstanding theme of my editing career has been to carefully monitor how education is affected by broad social and economic trends. In this article I edited, my colleagues and I examined how the drive to use online education in the Middle East during the Covid-19 pandemic weakened access to education for girls, refugees, and students from low-income families.
The Frustrating Lives of Syria’s Future Leaders
Two articles I edited about students pursuing advanced degrees inside Syria created a detailed perspective of those who are trying to rise to the highest levels of academic achievement, in a nation coping with the effects of civil war. Despite facing enormous obstacles, Syrian students expressed a yearning to help their country through research, teaching, and community service.
Leadership & Fundraising
I raised more than $5 million for Al-Fanar Media from blue-chip foundations. I led training workshops for Arab journalists interested in writing about education and research and organized events about refugee education that inspired donor support for that cause. I continue to seek ways to support enterprise journalism and social justice.
Mentoring Arab Journalists to Cover Education
A project that I led trained 58 Arab reporters to write about education. The project was supported by one of a handful of grants awarded by the UN Democracy Fund from an applicant pool of more than a thousand applicants. Many of the journalists who attended the workshops still write about education today.
Shaping the Conversation About Refugee Education
Four conferences that I and my colleagues from Al-Fanar Media organized in Istanbul, Amman, and New York from 2015 to 2016 focused the conversation about refugee education during the height of the Syrian conflict. The meetings also helped connect international donors with local expertise, local universities, and nongovernmental organizations working with refugees.
Highlighting the Work of Arab Researchers
I won six years of support for journalism that spotlighted the work of Arab researchers, who often face difficult conditions and have little institutional support. Al-Fanar Media covered both researchers’ discoveries and the obstacles they need to overcome.
Covid-19: The Virus That Devastated Arab Education
Before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the Arab region had long resisted online education in any form. I led the editorial team at Al-Fanar Media to produce in-depth coverage that revealed how the pandemic hurt the education of the most vulnerable youth, including the poor, those in conflict zones, and girls in socially conservative families.
Personal Writing and Photography
What My Father Inscribed
My father was a high-school dropout, a sign painter, a landscape artist, and a calligrapher who created diplomas with a metal-nibbed pen dipped in India ink. In his own quiet way, he encouraged education.
Three Poems: Death, Anxiety, and Meditation
Coming to Terms with Death, Hunting Season, and Othona Retreat were published in "Urthona: A Journal of Buddhism and the Arts." Reading and writing poetry since early adolescence has given me a way to understand my emotional and spiritual life, a better ear for sound in language and a way to strengthen the attention I pay to the world.
The Meaning of Travel: Reflections on a 4-Month Trip
When I was 18 years old, I went to Europe for four months on my own, although I had rarely spent a night away from home before that. Recently, I discovered letters I wrote to my parents during that trip. Those letters were the seeds for this essay.
Saying Goodbye to My Best Friend of 50 Years
I met my best friend, Roland Labrie, when I was a teenager and he was a teacher at my high school in Vermont. He was the first person I met who loved language, literature, and poetry as much as I did. We were friends for nearly 50 years. I delivered the eulogy at his 2018 funeral in York Maine.
Luxurious Devon Landscape
In August, 2018, I went for a retreat at the Sharpham Estate, a Georgian mansion in Devon, England. Many of the grounds nearby were designed by the 18th-century gardener and landscape architect known as Capability Brown, sometimes called “England’s greatest gardener.”
Castles and Gardens in Wales
Although I lived in the United Kingdom for nine years, I didn’t get around to visiting Wales until 2022. I drove in a loop, from Cardiff to Snowdonia National Park via the West Coast. I thought I had seen the height of British gardening in London, but was impressed by Bodnant Garden, near Conwy.
Mosques, Caves, and Balloons
I’ve been to Turkey five times, for both work and pleasure, and I’ve loved every trip. The architecture, the people, the food, and the rich heritage and archaeological sites make it one of my favorite destinations.
The Land of a Thousand Smiles
I first went to Thailand for work, in 1996, to write about some jazz musicians touring there and to report on AIDS research. I met my future wife then, and married her in 2000. As a result, I have been to Thailand many times and been steeped in its culture, people, and way of celebrating Buddhism.
Stephen Jay Gould: Passionate Advocate for Evolutionary Biology
Stephen Jay Gould was a Harvard University biology professor, prolific popularizer of science, and a pugnacious intellectual who took on creationism and fellow academics who he thought misinterpreted or misused evolutionary biology.
Robert Creeley, a Poet Who Mirrored His Time
Robert Creeley is often cited as one of the greatest poets of the last half of the twentieth century. I once wrote that he can “shake a lot of meaning out of a few words.” He spoke with me about jazz, poetry, his Yankee influences, his dislike for poetry workshops, and why Robert Frost was the “Colonel Sanders of poetry.”
Services
Along with reporting and writing in all journalistic formats, I am experienced in writing grant proposals, ghostwriting editorial commentary for executives, and writing reports for corporate and nonprofit clients. My editing services range from organizational and developmental editing to fine-grained copyediting and fact checking. I enjoy organizing thought leader, boutique-style events, in-person or online. I prefer to charge by the hour.