William McKenzie

William McKenzie is senior editorial advisor at the George W. Bush Institute, where he is working on editorial projects on democracy and freedom and education reform. He previously served as founding editor of The Catalyst: A Journal of Ideas from the Bush Institute, the winner of a 2019 Best Digital Journal award from Editor and Publisher.

As an adjunct journalism lecturer at SMU, he teaches a course on media and politics. He also has led a course on education policy and journalism.

Before joining the Bush Institute, the Fort Worth native served 22 years as an editorial columnist for The Dallas Morning News and led the newspaper’s Texas Faith blog. The University of Texas graduate’s columns appeared nationwide and he has won a Pulitzer Prize and commentary awards from the Education Writers Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the Texas Headliners Foundation, among other organizations. He still contributes columns and essays for the Morning News and other publications.

Before joining the News in 1991, he earned a master’s degree in political science from the University of Texas at Arlington and spent a dozen years in Washington, D.C. During that time, he edited the Ripon Forum.

McKenzie has served as a Pulitzer Prize juror, on the board of homeless organizations in Dallas and Washington, and on governing committees of a Dallas public school. He is a member of the Fort Worth Independent School District’s Hall of Fame and an elder of the First Presbyterian Church in Dallas, where he lives with his wife and their twin children.