Mark Potok is a civil rights expert, director of publications and information for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, Alabama, a nonprofit organization that combats hate, intolerance and discrimination through education and litigation. He is the editor of award-winning, quarterly investigative journal Intelligence Report. According to Huffington Post, Potok "leads one of the most highly regarded operations monitoring the extreme right in the world today". He has testified before the United States Senate, the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights and in other venues. Previously he spent almost 20 years as an award-winning reporter at newspapers including USA Today the Dallas Times Herald and the Miami Herald. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a package of stories on racism in 1996. Potok is regularly quoted by major media, scholars and book authors in United States and abroad. The Intelligence Report he edits recently received the 2007 Investigative Award part of the UTNE Independent Press Awards.

In 1974-1978 he studied at University of Chicago.