Sakina Spruell Cole is an Editor-at-Large at BLACK ENTERPRISE magazine. She has also served as a contributing writer at Fortune Small Business and a freelance writer/producer at CNN financial network. Spruell regularly presents financial empowerment seminars to African American professional organizations and college groups. She is also a summer instructor at Columbia University in New York City, where she teaches Introduction to Journalism to first-year students.
With some 10 years of journalism experience, Spruell has honed her skills in a broad range of media outlets. Prior to freelancing full time, she was a senior editor at BLACK ENTERPRISE magazine. In that role she was responsible for assigning and editing daily business news stories, as well as selecting and re-purposing magazine content for the Careers, Investing, Entrepreneur, and Personal Finance channels on the magazine’s Website, BlackEnterprise.com. Spruell was also the founding editor of Black Enterprise's Teenpreneur, a quarterly magazine targeted to teenage entrepreneurs.
Spruell joined BLACK ENTERPRISE in 1998 as a freelance contributor. In 2000, she became the business news editor, responsible for assigning, editing, or writing all business news features, as well as determining the editorial direction of Newspoints, a section of BLACK ENTERPRISE magazine that covered business news and trends. Additionally, she organized and moderated a bi-annual roundtable meeting of the BLACK ENTERPRISE Board of Economists, a gathering of the leading African American economists in the nation, to discuss economic factors of concern to the African American community.
Prior to joining BE, Spruell worked as a staff writer at a Gannet daily newspaper, the Home News Tribune, and as a news reporter and producer with New Jersey’s CNN Headline News Local Edition. She began her professional career in radio as a research director at WBLS-FM (NY) and is a former weekend news anchor at National Public Radio, WHYY-Philadelphia.
In 2003 Spruell completed the Knight Bagehot Fellowship in economics and business journalism and received a Master’s of Science degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She is a 1993 graduate of Rutgers University with a bachelor’s degree in African American Studies, and co-chair of the Business Writers Task Force for the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). She received the Griot Award for Excellence from the New York Chapter of NABJ in 2000. Spruell resides in Newark, New Jersey, with her husband and two children.
