James Kirchick is a columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail, and author of the instant New York Times bestseller Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the Spectator, among many other publications. His first book, The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age, was published by Yale University Press in 2017.

Kirchick is presently a Nonresident Senior Fellow for the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council. He was a visiting fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe and Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. Prior to Brookings, he was a fellow at the Foreign Policy Initiative and a Robert Bosch Foundation fellow in Berlin. In 2010, he became writer-at-large for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty based in Prague.

Kirchick has spoken at colleges and universities across the United States and at venues around the world including the Oslo Freedom Forum, the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, the Stockholm Free World Forum, the American Library in Paris, the Warsaw Security Forum, the Lennart Meri Conference, and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. He is also a recipient of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Journalist of the Year Award and is a professional member of the PEN American Center.