Sonali Kolhatkar

joined YES! in summer 2021 and builds on a long and successful career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist and presenter and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonalia nationally syndicated television and radio program broadcast on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and local radio stations. She is also senior correspondent for the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project, where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Standing Up: The Power of Narrative in the Pursuit of Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her next book is called Talk about abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group Afghan Women’s Mission, which she co-founded in 2000. She holds a master’s degree in astronomy from the University of Hawai’i and two bachelor’s degrees in physics and astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My journey from astrophysicist to radio host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name.