Wil S. Hylton is an American journalist. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine^[1] and has published cover stories for The New Yorker,^[2] Rolling Stone,^[3] Esquire,^[4] Harper's,^[5] Details, GQ,^[6] New York,^[7][8] Outside,^[9] and many others.

Hylton was born in Baltimore, Maryland and attended Baltimore City College high school. He enrolled in Kenyon College for a year before being expelled.^[10]

Hylton began publishing articles in The Baltimore Sun as a teenager,^[11] and was writing for major magazines by his early twenties.^[3][12][4] In 1999 he bicycled across Cuba for Esquire,^[13] climbed the Ecuadorean Andes for Details, and wrote about Hugh Hefner for Rolling Stone.^[14]

At 24, Hylton was hired as a Contributing Editor at Esquire, where he wrote about the invasion of Afghanistan,^[15] attempts to patent the human genome,^[16] and the prosecution of alleged nuclear spy Wen Ho Lee.^[17] After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Hylton became a Washington Correspondent for GQ, publishing criticism of the war^[18][19] and drafting articles of impeachment for Dick Cheney.^[20][21] He was the first journalist to interview Joe Darby, the whistleblower at Abu Ghraib prison.^[22]

Hylton was hired by The New York Times Magazine as a Contributing Writer in 2010.^[1] In October 2011, Hugo Lindgren, editor of The New York Times Magazine, wrote, "By now you should know that when you see Wil's byline on a piece, it doesn't really matter what it's about. Just read it.”^[23] Hylton has written for the magazine about bioterrorism,^[24] the search for Air France Flight 447,^[25] the influence of Breitbart News,^[26] and the prosecution of police officers after the death of Freddie Gray.^[27] His February 8, 2015 article about the family detention policy to imprison Central American women and children^[28] was cited by a federal judge in an injunction to suspend the policy two weeks later.^[29] His 2016 profile of the painter Chuck Close was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Feature Writing.^[30]

In 2018, Hylton stated on The Daily that he was conducting secret interviews with the Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López, who at the time was under house arrest.^[31][32]

Hylton is a recipient of the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Journalism by the Medill School of Journalism^[33] and his articles have been anthologized in the books "Best Political Writing," "Best Music Writing," and "Best Business Stories."^[34] He is a Special Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University^[35] and a member of the faculty at the MFA program in creative nonfiction at Goucher College.^[36]

Hylton lives in Baltimore; he is divorced with two children.^[37]

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (December 2019)

• "A bug in the system : why last night's chicken made you sick". Annals of Food. The New Yorker. 90 (46): 30–35. February 2, 2015.
• "My cousin was my hero. Until the day he tried to kill me". The New York Times Magazine. May 8, 2019.

The New York Times Magazine

• Down the Breitbart Hole
• Baltimore vs. Marilyn Mosby
• The Mysterious Metamorphosis of Chuck Close
• The Land of Smoke and Fog
• The God of Small Things
• What Happened to Air France Flight 447?
• How Ready Are We for Bioterrorism?

GQ

• Hope. Change. Reality.
• The Unspeakable Choice
• Meltdown

Harper's

• Broken Heartland
• Sick on the Inside

Esquire

• Mazar-i-Sharif
• Guilty

The Atlantic

• Deep-Sea Mining and the Race to the Bottom of the Ocean Reposted on MSN as "History's largest mining operation is about to begin"