Adelle M. Banks
Adelle M. Banks is the projects editor and a national reporter for RNS, covering topics including religion and race, the faith of African Americans and partnerships between government and religious groups.
An award-winning journalist, Banks joined RNS in 1995. She previously was the religion reporter at the Orlando Sentinel and a reporter at The Providence Journal and newspapers in the upstate New York communities of Syracuse and Binghamton.
She is the co-author of “Becoming a Future-Ready Church: 8 Shifts to Encourage and Empower the Next Generation of Leaders.”
Banks was honored in 2024 with Religion News Association’s William A. Reed Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2023 at The Unsung She-Roes Awards: Centering and Celebrating Black Women in Ministry for outstanding media coverage. She received the Washington Association of Black Journalists’ inaugural lifetime achievement award in 2022.
She is the third-place winner of the 2021 Best In-depth Newswriting on Religion Award from the American Academy of Religion. Banks spearheaded RNS’ “Beyond the Most Segregated Hour” project, which won a 2021 Wilbur Award from the Religion Communicators Council, and an RNS project on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, which won a 2014 Wilbur Award. Banks was a third-place winner in the Religion Newswriters Association’s Religion Reporter of the Year contest in 2011 and 1998. She also has received first-place Associated Church Press awards in news, convention, photography and multimedia categories.
Her writing has been featured in The Washington Post, USA Today, Christian Century, Christianity Today, Jet, BlackVoices.com, Sojourners, Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly, Nieman Reports and the 2006 book “Good News: The Best Religion Writing in North America.”
Banks is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. A former board member of the Religion News Foundation, she is a public speaker on religion reporting at gatherings of students, scholars, journalists and other communicators.
