Jason Kyle Howard is the Senior Ideas Editor for Salon. In addition to overseeing Ideas coverage, he writes about the Democratic Party’s efforts to construct a winning message and agenda, and how politicians use political rhetoric to influence public opinion and shape the American people’s perception of political and cultural moments.

Howard has been a journalist and nonfiction writer for 20 years, and his writing has often stood at the intersection of politics and culture. His features, commentary, analysis and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, The New Republic, Washington Monthly, The Nation, Town & Country, Garden & Gun, Oxford American and other publications and anthologies, and on NPR and C-SPAN’s Book TV. Over the years he has written about how the media should cover President Trump’s indictment, Queen Elizabeth II’s death, an eminent domain case before the Supreme Court, the fight for LGBTQ+ rights in rural America, heirs’ property rights of Black South Carolinians, a gay coal miner suing international energy conglomerate Massey Energy for sexual harassment and gender discrimination, and other topics. In his culture writing, Howard has interviewed some of our most intriguing writers, artists and thinkers, including Yoko Ono, Rosanne Cash, Ashley Judd, Carly Simon, Mike Hadreas (of Perfume Genius) and Garth Greenwell.

He is the author of A Few Honest Words, which explores how the land and culture of Kentucky have shaped American music through the work of musicians including Naomi Judd, Joan Osborne, Dwight Yoakam, Nappy Roots, Matraca Berg, Jim James and others. With bestselling novelist Silas House, he wrote the acclaimed Something's Rising, which was hailed by the late Studs Terkel as “a revelatory work” for its unflinching look at mountaintop removal coal mining through the eyes of thirteen environmental activists. With House, he wrote the story for the Grammy-nominated music video of "In Your Love" by Tyler Childers. Released in July 2023 and starring Colton Haynes and James Scully, it was the first country music video with a gay storyline to be released by a major record label.
 
The former senior editor and staff writer for Equal Justice Magazine, Howard was editor of the literary quarterly Appalachian Review from 2013-2025, where he published writers including bell hooks, Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, Gloria Steinem, Lee Smith, Silas House, Crystal Wilkinson, Frank X Walker, Neela Vaswani, Maurice Manning and others. 

Howard serves as a writing professor at Berea College and on the faculty of Spalding University's Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. He holds a BA in Political Communication from The George Washington University, an MA in History from the University of Kentucky and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

A street haunter in the tradition of Virginia Woolf, he has an enduring love of walking, tea, dogs, rivers, trains, cardigans, hot water bottles, live music, Washington D.C., American and English political history, and Anne Boleyn. ​