Donovan Scribes is an award-winning writer, producer, and communications consultant and civic strategiest based in Portland, OR.

Donovan Scribes crafts words and stories that shift both policy and culture. He created and edited BlackOut: A 5 Year Retrospective of Portland’s Racial Justice Protests in which 40,000 copies were distributed across Portland, eventually reaching readers across the U.S., Canada and Ghana. The magazine, which features a dozen essays and interviews with 12 Black Portlanders – including Scribes – has won an SPJ award, inspired school curriculum, and been called “primary source for people around the world to understand this important crossroads of local and national Black history” by 1803 Fund, the largest Black woman-owned investment firm in America. Scribes now helms a bi-weekly column for the Portland Mercury titled “The Black Byline” where he writes reported essays on race, culture and politics from both a local and national lens.

He served as co-producer and co-host on the Apple chart-topping 10-part podcast Uprising: a Guide from Portland for iHeartRadio, with millions of downloads per episode.

His docuseries, Where We Goin? Power of Place follows a millennial filmmaker from the whitest city in America to the Blackest zip codes in the country on his search for home and belonging. The pilot episode has been screened nationwide winning the coveted Grand Jury Award from WorldFest Houston-International, and Best Featurette at Film Invasion LA.

A former staff reporter for the largest Black newspaper in the Pacific Northwest, The Skanner, Scribes has emerged as an independent cultural bridgemaker who uses storytelling to document, preserve and uplift Black life and connect the dots between policy, possibility and the complexity of the human spirit.

Scribes has been quoted in the Washington Post, USA Today, The FADER, Boston Globe, China Morning Post and more.