Student Profiles
Literary Reportage 2023
Natalie Albaran (natalie.albaran@nyu.edu) is a triplet, which is, arguably, her coolest descriptor. In terms of descriptors she has not as a matter of birth, her favorite is storyteller. She is a UCLA graduate who learned she was conceived via egg donor two months before her 18th birthday (a discovery she chronicled for the US Donor Conceived Council), which started a humbling journey of reconstructing her worldview and identity— especially her notions of cultural belonging and family. So also began her education on the corruption of the United States’ fertility industry, which she continues to bring to light. As the child of Filipino immigrants, and as a Michigan native, she likes to joke that she’s from both the bundok and the boondocks. These identities, plus her time in Los Angeles, where she studied, danced, and tried her hand as a cook, have added dimension to her political, social, and economic perspective, which she explores in her writing— primarily personal essays. Though she centers these topics in most of her writing, Natalie is also interested in comedic writing, as humor has been an invaluable coping and learning tool for her.
Rayan El Amine is a writer from Beirut, currently living in Manhattan, where the streets do not smell like cigarettes and fetid waste—though sometimes he wishes they did. He’s consumed by the ways communities bear the consequences of displacement and disruption. Melding those themes with his own migratory experience, he tries to produce work that fights against traditional understandings of survival and immigration. Both within the United States, like the journey an Afghan soldier in the U.S army took to a tiny neighborhood in West Albany, or the fight to keep the Mid-Hudson Valley’s poorest public school alive. And outside of it, like the Iranian iPhone app which has been a rudder in the recent revolution or the Syrian government’s attempt at hiding its history of human rights violations through Instagram. He graduated from Vassar College in 2023 with a degree in Sociology and has written for Coda Story, The River Newsroom, Chronogram Magazine and the NYC reporting collective ProtestNY. He has also worked as a researcher for the Civil Rights Restorative Justice Project, investigating a history of untold lynchings in the American South. He lives in the East Village atop a Hookah lounge; a small consolation for the homesickness, he says.
Logan Davis (annalogandavis@gmail.com) is a writer based in Brooklyn. She grew up in Ohio but went West at age 18, where she spent a decade: college in Washington, teaching in Wyoming, and pretending to be someone she absolutely wasn’t in California. She switched jobs as often as states, writing along the way about technology, wine, modern dating, and all things sustainability—until she realized that she may as well give into her curiosities and become a journalist. Be it Silicon Valley or a residential outdoor school in the Tetons, she’s always found herself in immersive experiences; she’s compelled by how we participate in and are shaped by our communities and the places we live. Primarily a personal essay writer, she’s eager to learn how to enrich the form with intimate reporting to profile people and places that we have something to learn from.
Chloe Irving is a Brooklyn-based journalist and essayist. After receiving her B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, she became a staff writer for InStyle, Shape, and Health. During her two years in New York, she’s covered events like fashion week and the U.S. Open and interviewed celebrities ranging from Venus Williams to Bethenny Frankel. She is well-versed in the fitness, beauty, and fashion industries, and the manner that they affect (or more often, invade) culture and consumer mindsets. In her independent work, Chloe draws upon her background as an Arab American and the considerable time she spends in the Middle East to create narratives that lend humanity to topics like territory dispute, eco-warfare, and religious tension.
Elsa Kelmendi (ek3893@nyu.edu) is no Ira Glass, and her stories may not be like those on This American Life, but she is an up-and-coming journalist who is curious about the world and just happens to be passionate about all things sound. Her fervor for journalism is newfound however, for Elsa did not always know she wanted to be a journalist. She grew up in Klinë, a small village in northwestern Kosovo, in a family that values the sciences; and for a long time, she followed suit. She attended the high school for natural sciences in Pristina, Kosovo, and then went to the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG) intent on studying economics and business. It was not until her junior year of college that she truly stepped into the world of journalism, when she wrote her first narrative about her father who died in the war of 1999 in Kosovo. Sharing that personal story gave Elsa an entirely new perspective of journalism – one beyond ‘the news’. To her, journalism was no longer a mere field of study or a prospective career; it became a way of life. By senior year, Elsa was a producer at the AUBG’s Radio Aura, the student representative of the Journalism and Mass Communication (JMC) department, a writing tutor, a member of the Conduct Council, and the first manager of the university’s recording studio. She was later recognized for her outstanding achievement in JMC at the Honors Convocation, and for her capstone project, Elsa created a podcast about five people in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, who made that small town her second home. After receiving a BA in JMC and Business Administration, Elsa returned home where she started out as a freelance multimedia journalist, and later worked for Kosovo’s oldest news agency, KosovaPress, as well as UNDP Kosovo. She comes to NYU as a Fulbright student looking to get a new sense of adventure and explore her writing and storytelling skills further. She wants to get out there, meet people, listen to their stories, and give life to narratives that bring people together.
Cheyenne McNeill is a storyteller from southeastern North Carolina. From a young age, she’s held a fondness for storytelling—a trait she inherited from her maternal grandmother. Cheyenne attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she majored in broadcast and electronic journalism. She’s a member of the Coharie Tribe, a small tribe located in Clinton, N.C. Since 2021, Cheyenne has covered rural communities in North Carolina, where she examined how a tribe restored its ancestral rivers and an audio series about the closing of a paper mill in Western North Carolina. She’s interested in sharing stories from rural communities and Indigenous peoples. Cheyenne looks forward to exploring other topics, like marriage and relationships. Mostly, she wants to explore the smaller stories behind larger issues.
Garrett Owen (gco2025@nyu.edu) is a writer from Kansas City. He earned a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2017 and began a career in EMS. He worked as an EMT in Aurora, Colorado, and in the backcountry of northern New Mexico. Here he began to write about the harsh demands and casual traumas of the EMS life. He also worked as a screenplay editor in Paris, France and Geneva, Switzerland. (Something about following a girl overseas.) Since 2021, he has worked as a staff writer and editor for NYC-based FMHipHop and as a software sales consultant in Lenexa, Kansas. He is interested in how frontline, immersive journalism can shine a light on the difficult, visceral stories of life to everyday people.
Sammie Seamon is a storyteller, long-distance runner, barista, artist and avid reader from Austin, Texas. She attended Williams College in Massachusetts, receiving her BA in English Literature and Spanish with a concentration in Creative Writing in 2023. In 2022, she completed her undergraduate thesis Bajo el sol, a work of creative nonfiction that tells the histories and mythologies of her mother’s village in remote Southern Mexico. She has also published a brief memoir in the Princeton Theological journal, HTI Open Plaza, about her experience growing up in the rigid Southern Pentecostal tradition. She is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and aims to be an advocate for her community as a bilingual, Latina journalist.
Literary Reportage 2022
Sophie Boker, a native New Yorker, earned her BA in psychology and neuroscience from Carleton College in 2018. Throughout undergrad, she worked in a variety of research labs and has continued to do so for the last few years in New York City. Sophie had planned to become a clinical psychologist with a focus on the intersection of mental health and social justice work, but felt frustrated by the time it takes to produce results and implement change, and even more frustrated at the ways individuals are reduced to statistics. She recently began to explore other avenues through which she could help bring her research participants’ stories to life. She hopes a formal training in journalism will help her share the experiences of those whose stories are often untold.
Meagan Clark Saliashvili earned a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from The King’s College in 2013, and a MA in Religion and Public Life from Harvard Divinity School in 2022. Since 2019, she has been the founding managing editor of ReligionUnplugged.com, a global online religion magazine covering faith, politics and culture. Her research is on the intersection of politics and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. She lived in Delhi, India for five years, and developed an interest in South Asian politics. She has reported for Newsweek, International Business Times, Dallas Morning News, Religion News Service and several other outlets including the Wire, Scroll.in and Indian Express in India and is a board member of the Associated Church Press.
Grayson Kelly is a chef, writer, and performance artist. He was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, and spent much of his childhood in Burgundy, France, the grandson of a French artist and cookbook writer. In 2017, he decided to follow his dreams of becoming a classically trained chef at the Institute of Culinary Education in lower Manhattan. He worked in some of the most demanding restaurants in New York City before nabbing a gig in the test kitchen at SAVEUR Magazine. In 2019, he moved back home to finish his B.A. in English (Writing, Rhetorics, and Literacies) at Arizona State University. In 2021, Grayson continued his education at the University of Southern California, where he received his M.A. in Specialized Journalism (The Arts) as one of two students in the program’s inaugural “Food and Culture” track. At USC, Grayson witnessed first-hand the power of journalism while reporting on food sovereignty and regenerative agriculture in Los Angeles county, bringing local attention to a struggling regenerative farm in Fillmore, CA. Now, Grayson has the urge to bite off, perhaps, more than he can chew at NYU. Inspired by raw, honest, and exciting narrative reporting–Gloria Steinem’s “A Bunny’s Tale” and Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential are among his favorites–Grayson looks forward to venturing outside the food bubble to write about other topics he’s passionate about: pop culture, sex, politics, addiction, and the LGBTQ+ community.
Shaan Merchant (shaanmerchant1@gmail.com) loves to eat. Growing up in the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee as part of a spirited Indian American family, he quickly learned that food and humor were some of the most impactful tools in communicating culture. At Tufts University his Spanish literature major led to work in a wine shop in Spain. He also self-created a major looking at political media through a sociological lens and researched the impact of race and gender in political communication. He has worked for some of the political communicators he most admires: at The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, and most recently as a researcher on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. He looks to bring levity into much of his writing, and has written for Conde Nast Traveler, Philadelphia Inquirer, Food52 and is a regular contributor to The Takeout. He is interested in exploring American identity, especially through the lens of food, culture and politics.
Muskan Nagpal (muskanagpal98@gmail.com) is drawn to identities — what shapes people, how do they enact themselves, and why do they make the choices they make? She is most enthused about writing stories at the intersection of multiple forces – from gender and politics to globalization and culture. Coming from India, she has a special affinity for all things South Asian, particularly Bombay Cinema and regional politics. Along with writing, Muskan has a keen eye for quirky visuals and vibrant voices, and enjoys adapting good writing to audio-visual media. She studied English Literature at the University of Delhi, and has worked in multimedia production at Mojo Story and The Wire.in, new-age digital newsrooms based in India. Muskan is a Young India Fellow from Ashoka University, where she completed a yearlong interdisciplinary liberal arts program.
Kim Nederveen Pieterse is a podcast producer based in Brooklyn, New York, where the brownstones remind her of her childhood home in Amsterdam. She gets excited about heady concepts that help her make sense of (or mystify) the strange world we live in. And then grounding those concepts in emotional, sometimes goofy, personal stories. Like the fossil site behind a Lowe’s hardware store in New Jersey, that might finally explain what killed the dinosaurs; the village in the German Alps that has performed one play – the Passion of The Christ – for the past five hundred years, but was once loved by Hitler; and the seven-year conflict brewing on the back pages of one man’s Wikipedia page, about a single bad joke. She has spent the past five years making audio documentaries for TED, Reply All, and – currently – The Wall Street Journal’s daily narrative news podcast, The Journal. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post. She enjoys talking to strangers on the phone.
Yucheng “Tang Tang” Tang (tangyucheng516@gmail.com) had never left the small county in eastern China where he was born before he went to Shanghai to study journalism. There, he saw the diversity and inequality of the world for the first time, meeting all kinds of people as an intern reporter for several publications, including The New York Times. After graduation, he traveled across China, working as an investigative journalist at Southern Weekend and then as a feature writer at Portrait Magazine. Yucheng enjoys capturing people’s subtle emotions, and weaving material together to evoke empathy and understanding from the audience. The piece he is most proud of is about a group of cardiac patients who relied on mechanical hearts, and how they coped with their imperfect bionic lives. In the past year, as a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University, he befriended classmates from different countries and saw firsthand how stories can break language and cultural barriers. He has a passion for stories at the intersection of technology, science, and humanity.
Mónica Baró Sánchez is an independent Cuban journalist. She graduated from Journalism at Havana University in 2012. In 2015, she co-founded Periodismo de Barrio, an independent digital magazine with an environmental agenda. In 2016, her reportage The Displacement (La mudanza) was a finalist for the Gabriel García Márquez Journalism Award. In 2018 she began to collaborate with the independent digital magazine El Estornudo and in January 2019 she became part of its team of reporters in Cuba. In 2019, her story “Blood Was Never Yellow,” about lead poisoning, won the Gabriel García Márquez Journalism Award. She has mainly reported on gender violence, natural disasters, repression and human rights. In January 2021, because of her job as a journalist and her activism in defense of freedom of expression, Mónica had to leave Cuba due to jail threats and harassment from the State Security Department. Since then she has lived in Madrid, Spain, where she has continued writing about Cuba. During the last year, she has collaborated with the Spanish newspapers El País and Diario.es, the Latin American magazine Gatopardo, and others. This year, her reportage The Displacement was included in the anthology Better than fiction, Paradigmatic Chronicles, which gathered 25 chronicles written in Spanish by Latin American authors and published between 2001 and 2021. Right now, she is working on two books, one novel and one journalistic project.
Nayanika Guha (nayanikaguha23@gmail.com) grew up in a family of women, from where she learned to be loud and opinionated, with a passion for social justice. In school, she was always found with her nose in her Enid Blytons during recess, and sometimes even when she was supposed to be paying attention to physics. However, she revolted when her classmates asked if she was going to be a writer when she grew up. She was determined to be a psychologist and completed her bachelors in the subject from Ashoka University. After university, she worked for various non-profits. Her journey took her to Ladakh, where this big-city girl lived in a cold, remote, and immensely beautiful village in the Himalayas, and learned to live and build community with people she had little in common with. While there, she focused on her writing, incorporating lessons from her time in the nonprofit sector. She has written about the lives of nomadic women in Ladakh, water issues in the town of Leh, and youth unemployment. She has written about vaccine inequality in India for The Guardian, US policy’s impact on abortion access for Truthout, the upending of Afghan women athletes’ lives after the Taliban takeover for The Lily, and the complicated relationship between burnout, rest, and capitalism for Refinery 29.
Tracy J. Jawad was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. She has a BA in Politics from Queen Mary University of London, and currently resides in New York. She writes about Arab identity and culture, interviewing women, migrants, and youth whose lives were interrupted by corruption and war. Her work mainly explores how individuals persist under extraordinary circumstances in their everyday lives, relying on friendship and community as means for resistance and survival.
Literary Reportage 2021
Sarah Baik (sb8177@nyu.edu) was born in Montreal, spent most of her childhood in South Korea, and calls Vancouver, Canada home. She has a BA in International Relations from the University of British Columbia. Since then, she has meandered through Europe, taught English in rural South Korea, and worked in student affairs, supporting international students in postsecondary settings. Inspired by podcasts like 99% Invisible, This American Life, and Rough Translation, she started Coffee Stained Stories, which features stories shared over a cup of coffee by friends and strangers, daydreamers and hustlers.
Atul Bhattarai (atulbhattarai@gmail.com) is a journalist with a keen interest in history. He values writing that attempts to hack away at modern mythologies in favor of informed ambivalence. For several years he reported from South Asia, writing long-form pieces about politics, religion, culture, and technology for publications such as The Caravan, The Atlantic, Rest of World and Outside. Having grown up between Kathmandu, New York City and Colombo, he’s fascinated by issues of identity and roots. He was graduated from Harvard, where he studied government and English literature.
Haidee Chu (chuhaidee@gmail.com) was born in Hong Kong and spent her formative years in Massachusetts and Wisconsin, after migrating to the U.S. when she was 13. Growing up between two worlds, Haidee has always turned to art-making and writing to make sense of the way her identity functions in translation. She is most interested in exploring how social and cultural dynamics across contexts inform, divide, and unify human experiences — especially as technology and design reshapes our everyday lives. Haidee was graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and was a Toni Stabile Fellow for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University, where she began incorporating data and computational journalism into her practice. Her work has appeared in Mashable, THE CITY, The New Republic, and Time Out Hong Kong.
Garrott Graham (garrott.graham@gmail.
Though her name belies her shtetl origins, there are few things that Quinn Halman loves more than smoked fish and a spirited discussion. A graduate of McGill University, she cut her teeth as the Opinion section then Managing Editor of the school’s largest student-run news magazine while she applied the ideas of scholars like Derrida, Adorno, and Hebdige to a range of films. Having previously worked at institutions like Interior Design magazine, and the now-defunct fashion blog Man Repeller, Halman is perpetually curious about how our aesthetic preferences inform and influence our worldview, and the implications of deeming such interests as frivolous. Halman cites June 13, 2019 as one of the best nights of her life, as it is when her hometown team, the Toronto Raptors, won their first NBA Championship.
Grace Heerman (grace@graceheerman.com) is a reporter, copywriter and website designer, based out of her backpack. A dedicated traveler, Grace has used her location independence to explore Asia and Europe extensively, with a particular interest in the spiritual and religious traditions of the places she visits. After graduating from the University of Puget Sound, she worked for Seattle-based publications before starting her copywriting and website design business, Said with Grace. She has spent the years since helping coaches tell strong brand stories that capture their expertise and speak to their clients’ needs. As she transitions into more reporting work, she looks forward to exploring the intersection of spirituality, wellness and modern life.
Laura Jedeed is a political junkie whose work focuses on social justice and the American far right. After a childhood steeped in Ayn Rand, and a five-year stint in the United States Army, Laura became disillusioned with America’s foreign adventures as her political views moved leftwards. She studied political science at Reed College, where she wrote a thesis on the far-right group Patriot Prayer. After Reed, she continued reporting on the far right, often undercover, and provided live on-the-ground coverage of Portland’s 100+ nights of protests in the summer of 2020. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Truthout, and Portland Monthly; her footage has appeared on ABC, CBS, Newsweek, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book about her experience at CPAC 2021.
Michael Levy (michael.d.levy90@gmail.com) is a climber. He writes, too. He comes to NYU from Carbondale, Colorado, where he was an editor at Rock and Ice, Climbing and Ascent magazines. He is also an editor of Alpina, the mountaineering section of Appalachia, America’s longest-running journal of mountaineering and conservation. His work has appeared in U.S. and foreign publications including Rock and Ice, Climbing, Ascent, Appalachia, Mountain Gazette, Adventure Journal, and Boulder Weekly.
He received a BA in English from Williams College, with a Concentration in Middle Eastern Studies, after which he worked at Boston’s Albert Einstein Institution, assisting the late Dr. Gene Sharp—once called the “Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare.” He worked as a rock climbing guide and outdoor educator in Vietnam and China, and then for a bitcoin startup—which makes his inability to speak intelligently about cryptocurrency all the more embarrassing. Visit michaeldavidlevy.com to see his full portfolio.
Charlie Lyttle (lyttle.charlie96@gmail.com) is a writer, musician, and audio producer whose journalism sits at the intersection of community activism, identity, and material culture. As an NYU undergrad, he was WNYU’s News Director, and produced A-C-E (Art Collected En Route), a show that featured up-and-coming performing artists. He has also worked for the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) and the Humane Society. Charlie is an assimilated Jew who also (ironically) lives in South Williamsburg. In his free time, Charlie bowls around Brooklyn, and composes music. In his view, culture is composed of “all the sounds of the city,” especially as they intersect with people, places, and things – meaning audio production and journalism are in many ways directly intertwined.
Mariama Mansaray (mariama.mansaray@nyu.edu) grew up in Sierra Leone, West Africa, and immigrated to the United States when she was 15. She received a BA in Journalism and Public Relations from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and is a Staff Sergeant in the Army National Guard. As someone born and raised in a society that much of western media has deemed “third world” or “uncivilized,” I’ve become curious about how people defy the narratives that have been written for them. I am drawn to stories investigating the reality and politics of being Black in America, the experience of immigration, and the effect of assimilation. I believe everyone has a story to tell, and how that story is told is important. Too often, unless the person is someone society deems “important,” her story goes unheard. I use journalism to bridge that gap.
Carrigan Miller (crrgn.miller@gmail.com) was born in Manhattan and raised in Northern New Jersey in the shadows of the Watchung Mountains. He studied English literature and psychology at Macalester College, where he was the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, and an all-conference offensive tackle. He also edited the Pensive Post, which published student essays and creative work. Before coming to NYU, he covered health care and technology for the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, and ran its startup-focused sister site, Minne Inno. He won local awards for his coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic and the civil uprising in Minneapolis after George Floyd was murdered. At NYU he hopes to write about subcultures and communities. He lives on the Upper West Side and collects vinyl records, books and tattoos.
Noran Morsi (noran@nyu.edu) is a writer and podcaster with a BA in Multimedia Journalism from the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Born and raised in Cairo, Noran’s teenage years coincided with the January 25 revolution. Noran spent her first year post-grad as a reporter at Egyptian Streets, an independent online publication, where she founded the Egyptian Streets Podcast. Noran has written two short plays, and is interested in creating documentary theatre work. She’s excited to be in New York to write about immigration, erased art and cultures of the so-called “East”, Muslim woman joy, and more.
Inge Oosterhoff (ijo2009@nyu.edu) started out studying fashion design but wound up weaving stories instead. Raised in a small Dutch town, Inge holds a BA in Language and Culture Studies from Utrecht University (a major in American Studies, with a minor in Youth Culture, Music and Media) and an MA in North American Studies from Leiden University. She fell in love with narrative nonfiction while interning at Voice of Witness, an oral history organization in San Francisco, and is a board member of the Dutch Narrative Journalism Foundation. As a freelance journalist, Inge has worked on stories of social justice, cultural conflict and forgotten histories through long form, audio, documentary film, digital media and more recently OSINT and data journalism.
Mormei Zanke (mormeizanke@gmail.com) is a journalist and poet from Alberta, Canada. She double majored in English literature and creative writing at the University of British Columbia, where she co-hosted an advice radio show, and worked on UBC’s marketing team, composing faculty profiles and feature stories. Her undergraduate degree cultivated a strong sense of empathy, which she carries throughout her work. After college, she relocated to Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, to teach English at a rural junior high school. During the pandemic lockdown she produced Creativity Calls, a podcast in which she interviewed artists about the impact of isolation on their work. At NYU, she looks forward to exploring how print and audio reportage can work in tandem to tell multifaceted stories about identity and culture.
Literary Reportage 2020
Briana Brady (brady.briana@gmail.com) grew up in a Connecticut town most notable for hosting what is allegedly the nation’s oldest annual pet parade. She majored in English literature and philosophy at St. Michael’s College and spent a semester in Morocco studying human rights and researching women’s autonomy. After graduating, she began working in nonprofits. She served for a couple of years as an AmeriCorps VISTA, which entailed driving a library-on-wheels across rural Vermont, and then moved on to a position at a human services agency in Mississippi, where she learned more than she ever thought she would about charitable bingo. Briana is excited to transition into the world of journalism and about the expanding possibilities of audio. In her free time, she can be found listening to podcasts while she crochets somewhat elaborate blankets for her family and friends.
Emily Carmichael (emilycarmichael19@gmail.com) hails from a wooded place just north of Houston where she learned that the end goal of evolution is not a house in the suburbs, no matter how beautiful its landscaping. She decamped to the warm folds of New Orleans to attend Tulane University with dreams of being a therapist. However, a turn as the news editor of the campus paper and a gig ghostwriting the second editions of a pair of New York Times Bestsellers taught her that her ambitions might not be best realized in talk therapy, though she still finds therapy to be a beautiful practice. After graduating with degrees in English and Psychology and a minor in Social Entrepreneurship, she took five months to travel through Asia and Europe, but mostly Asia, then returned to New Orleans to launch a freelance career as a content manager and journalist and obtain her certification as a yoga teacher. A year and half and many food articles later, she is still hungry. At NYU, she will explore how the American culture of consumption, for better and for worse, contours our lives.
Anna Venarchik (dailyanna12@gmail.com) is from the Tennessee Valley of northern Alabama. She moved to Chicago for college where she studied communications and theology. As a new urbanite, she saw her first skyscrapers and collected affinities for city cycling, Thai food, and improv theatre. Since her performances throughout the city were mediocre at best, she instead reported for an independent theater and has written for a number of satire publications. After graduating, she taught high school world literature, composition, and drama on Chicago’s South/West Side. It was while simultaneously immersed in the novels of her curriculum and the lives of her students that her interests in literary journalism crystallized. Since teaching, she has worked in publishing and studied creative nonfiction at Northwestern University. Due to her experiences in Chicago—against the backdrop of her Southern roots—Anna is interested in understanding the interplays between tradition and culture, history and heritage, and religion and politics.
Meg Duff (duffmeg@gmail.com) is fascinated by holy ground: what makes places sacred, and what happens when they change? Places that matter to her include a treehouse in a redwood forest, her close-knit block in downtown Oakland, San Francisco’s historically LGBTQ Mennonite church, and all the streets she’s painted as an arts organizer for climate justice. An evangelical pastor’s kid, Meg studied anthropology, psychology and philosophy at a Quaker college. At NYU, she plans to report on stories at the intersection of religion, culture and climate change. She comes to literary reportage from a career in nonprofit marketing, which gave her plenty of experience ghostwriting for executives and crafting brand listicles. Now she is excited to explore her own voice. Her family predicts it will be kind but biting and involve her usual “deep philosophical shtick.”
Merray Gerges (merray_gerges@hotmail.com) has been writing around art rather than about it. In her art history undergrad at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, she co-founded a free quarterly newsprint publication to teach herself how to write, edit and publish. When she undertook a journalism minor, her thesis project examined corporate diversity funding for art and culture (spoiler alert: it’s lip service). Her determination to shine a light on the gap between what institutions claim and what they practice has fuelled her journalism ever since. Over the past five years, she’s worked in Canadian contemporary-art print publishing, at Canadian Art and at C Magazine, in editorial capacities, where she pushed to make space for voices that the established art world had always marginalized. She looks forward to beginning a new body of work at NYU. She’s watched her Coptic Orthodox parents become more conservative since her brother’s viral Instagram outed him, and she’s curious to study how intergenerational Coptic values shift in diaspora against the backdrop of an election year. She chose New York because it’s home to one of the world’s largest Coptic diaspora communities. As both a participant and an observer, she’s committed to reporting with care.
Darshana Narayanan (darshana@dznarayanan.com) has a PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience from Princeton University, where she studied the evolutionary and developmental basis for communication in humans. She worked with marmosets, a new world monkey. After her PhD, she decided to apply her scientific training outside the academy. She has worked as Head of Research at a New York City start-up specializing in algorithmic hiring. She was a fellow at The Governance Lab, in the Technology, Culture and Society department, at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. She is a consultant for Polis, an open source machine learning tool used for analyzing public opinion on hot button issues. Her work has taken her to places as disparate as Kentucky and Taipei, local and national governments, start-ups and open source communities, prisons and strip clubs. Darshana has published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, as well as in general interest magazines like The Economist. She has long-standing interests in evolution, animal behavior (ours included), social organization, and technological innovation. Darshana grew up in a land of stories, in the lush Nilgiri Hills of southern India.
Clarissa Fragoso Pinheiro (cf2638@nyu.edu) grew up on the outskirts of São Paulo, where she spent most of her time reading compulsively. At the age of 17, she moved to Canada on her own to learn English and ended up staying in Vancouver for nearly a decade. During her initial years in Canada, she had the opportunity to work as a community organizer for a national non-profit, which ignited her desire to both understand and document the social issues she saw first-hand. In 2019, she graduated from Simon Fraser University with a Bachelor of Arts with distinction in Political Science. While studying, she worked as a legal assistant, founded a photography collective and volunteered as a crisis worker at a rape crisis centre. At university, she rediscovered Latin America through decolonial and feminist texts but felt frustrated with the rigid boundaries of academia. She is excited to now dive into the world of literary reportage.
Pooja Salhotra (pooja.salhotra27@gmail.com) grew up in Houston and is the daughter of immigrants from India. Pooja developed her passion for storytelling while at Yale University, where she served as City Editor for the Yale Daily News, reporting on subjects ranging from homelessness in New Haven to the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Since graduating in 2016 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and economics, Pooja has dabbled in a few different fields. She has been an analyst on PepsiCo’s sports marketing team, an investigator intern for the Legal Aid Society in Manhattan, an editorial assistant at a community magazine in Houston, and a first-year law student (briefly) at Harvard. She’s finally made her way back to her original joy, writing and reporting, and she seeks to elevate the voices of marginalized communities and individuals through her work. Outside of journalism, Pooja enjoys teaching yoga, playing with her dog Pearl, and sharing meals with friends and family.
Xinrou Shu (xinroushu@gmai.com) was born and raised in China. In high school’s literature class, Xinrou (also goes by Susilia) was fascinated by the power of fiction, for it illuminates the humanities. Leaving her home country in 2016, she started college at the University of California, Irvine, majoring in psychology and social behavior. Not satisfied with the ” text book ” style of social observation, in the junior year, she minored in literary journalism, which she realized facts can be told lively and artfully, like fiction. Specifically, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood lets her believe empathy and humanities make a good story. So far, her work includes profiles, long-form narrative stories and personal stories. As a Chinese international student, she sees and encounters stereotypes toward both Chinese students and Chinese people. Her identity enables her to take a more comprehensive perspective to observe the world, as well as give voice to underrepresented groups. As a non-native English speaker, though challenging, she enjoys writing in English and hopes to be a writer like Yiyun Li. As a bobaholic, she always rewards herself with boba milk tea for writing better in English.
Tessa Somberg (tes9668@nyu.edu) graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2018 where she studied print journalism and English, with an emphasis on poetics. She hails from Hillsborough, California, and has a passion for writing of all kinds. She attended the California State Summer School of the Arts (CSSSA) in 2012 where she was immersed in creative writing workshops for the first time, and received the state’s highest distinction for students in the arts. As an undergraduate, she interned twice for the Daily Camera, Boulder’s local newspaper, as both a features and news intern during her last two years of study. Her experiences have led her to some unexpected places, and the connections she formed with her neighbors and mentors motivated her to pursue her craft on a deeper level. After graduating, she became an editorial assistant for ABC-CLIO, an academic publisher, where she spent two years editing encyclopedias and other reference works under senior staff. She is thrilled to return to journalism as a student of literary reportage, and admires exploring abstract concepts such as place, identity, relationships, transformation, spirituality, and the environment.
Tenzin Tsagong (tsagongt@gmail.com) was born in Kathmandu, Nepal, but raised most of her life in Brooklyn, New York. Growing up as a daughter of a Tibetan refugee in the diaspora has led her to pursue different adventures in Tibet and in India and explore how the themes of exile and statelessness converge both on the larger sociopolitical level and the personal. Since graduating from Bowdoin College in 2016, she has spent most of her time in the northern Himalayan hills of Dharamshala, India where she enrolled in a Tibetan college to study Tibetan and Buddhism. She followed that educational stint by serving as an American India Foundation Clinton Fellow at the Central Tibetan Administration where she worked on progressing gender equity in the Tibetan refugee community in India. Her adventures and misadventures in exploring her Tibetan roots has led her to ultimately reach the conclusion that identity doesn’t always have to be this heavy, existential thing- that it can be light and buoyant and beautifully mundane. New to journalism, Tenzin is excited to pursue literary reporting and dig deeper into the craft of writing. The best decision Tenzin has ever made is not caving into her family’s desire for her to pursue law school- although she was so close to doing just that. She loves a good conversation and has a love/hate relationship with the self-help genre. Tenzin’s ultimate dream is to return back to Tibet and report from on-the-ground there.
Kudrat wants to report on seemingly quirky aspects of life and culture and connect them to broader structures and phenomena. She was born in Punjab in India, and then moved to a boarding school in a different part of the country. A graduate in Anthropology from Brown University, Kudrat is excited to use ethnographic skills in her writing and reporting. Lately, she has been fascinated by data and multimedia journalism and hopes to work on various media during her time at NYU. In her free time, you will find her watching obscure films, listening to music or out running.
Literary Reportage 2019
Jenna Barnett (jennacbarnett@gmail.com) is a multimedia journalist with roots in south Texas. She fell in love with literary journalism in San Diego as a Peace Writer for the Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice’s Women Peacemakers Program, where she had the opportunity to author the story of Namibian human rights activist and torture survivor Pauline Dempers. When that fellowship wrapped up, she stayed in California to manage the International Rescue Committee’s large urban gardens, composed of growers from nearly 20 different countries.
An editor and writer for Sojourners, she reported on clergy abuse, criminal justice reform, and gender inequality within the church, earning accolades from the Religious News Association and Folio Awards. Jenna loves pickup basketball and taking her time in board games.
Susanne Beck (sb7091@nyu.edu) grew up in the suburbs north of New York from which she happily moved on – to college and graduate school, followed by a meandering professional path that included stints with the US Forest Service (Idaho and Alaska), the US House of Representatives, investment banking, management consulting, and non-profit leadership. Many would consider such a trajectory random. Susanne always couched it as a mind rarely at rest.
The most recent stop on Susanne’s professional journey was the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University, including additional coursework at the School of Journalism where she successfully weighted the age curve of every class she attended. Her biggest take aways from the year on Morningside Heights: 1) she should have gone to journalism school years ago; 2) the Heights don’t compare to Astor Place.
Susanne hopes that her NYU professors and fellow classmates will be able to channel her irrepressible curiosity and taste for the lives of the un(dis)covered into something informative if not entertaining for readers at large. At the least she hopes that her new contemporaries won’t accuse her of the same infraction her children often allege: “Mom, you are overstepping your boundaries.”
Karol Cichocki (krc435@nyu.edu) was born in New York City and raised in Bialystok, a city in eastern Poland. He spent the past 10 years in Warsaw, where he graduated from Collegium Civitas with B.A. from Journalism and Political Science. As a journalist in Poland, he has worked for different media outlets (including news channel and several magazines). Karol is fascinated with the effect of art (especially novels, poetry, music, theater) on societies and political systems. In his free time, he wanders, reads, and visits his favorite bookstores.
Nate File (natefile95@gmail.com) grew up in New Jersey and thinks its reputation is mostly fair. While he was at Yale University, the school’s 2015 public reckoning with its structural racism became a formative moment for his identity and interests. He still found time for the Davenport Donut Club, a sketch comedy group and the club basketball team though.
He was not always set on journalism. Originally, he planned to go to law school, following an internship with the Bronx Defenders and two years working as a paralegal at a boutique civil rights firm in Manhattan. But he realized he missed writing and creative expression too much to consign himself to the legal world. He’s excited to explore a lot of topics in his writing, but especially race, culture and how they interact with music, sports and politics. He loves Megan Thee Stallion’s new album, his dog Russell, and NBA free agency rumors.
Kimon de Greef (kimondg@gmail.com) is a freelance journalist from South Africa. He studied conservation biology at the University of Cape Town, researched abalone smuggling for a master’s thesis, and began writing features in 2013. Since then he has reported on illegal mining, baboon-human conflict, corruption in fisheries, fossil shark tooth collectors and luxury golf estates; his first book, also on abalone poaching, came out in 2018. He has a longstanding interest in conservation conflict and illicit trades, especially where these intersect with issues of social justice. He obsessively reads nonfiction, loves interviewing people, collects music and spends too much time on the internet.
Meghan Gunn (megunn95@gmail.com) graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 2017, then set off to the island of Borneo on a Fulbright to work with brilliant yet underserved students. She is passionate about equal opportunity for disadvantaged youth and women’s empowerment programming. Although she’s always been an avid reader and recreational writer, she discovered the true power of stories while working in Borneo. While there, she received grants from the U.S. Embassy to publish a book of student work and organize a national women’s leadership summit where young female students could share their stories. She’s been published in Wash U and Cornell literary journals, and received scholarships from the St. Louis Press Club and the South Asian Journalism Association. She enjoys finding home in unfamiliar places, dislikes being too comfortable, and believes life’s too short to match socks. In her free time, you can find her at a hot yoga studio, rollerblading, or in her hammock eating avocados. She is currently unreachable, working in a rural Alaskan village with native youth.
Divya Karthikeyan (divya.karthikeyan94@gmail.com) grew up in a quiet neighbourhood in Chennai, India, a city she has a complicated relationship with. She knew she wanted to be a journalist as early as 11 years old and studied her undergraduate in journalism in Chennai, where she learnt she wasn’t very good at group projects. She also learnt that the subject was her calling. After a diploma in Broadcast Journalism, she discovered television journalism wasn’t her cup of tea and neither was New Delhi, which is touted as the hub of Indian journalism. She returned to her home city and discovered her love for independent journalism, writing for various Indian and international publications, including Deutsche Welle, CNN International, Washington Post, China Global Television Network and The Guardian. Since then, she has continued to haggle with editors to publish her longform journalism in publications that don’t have enough space for it. When she isn’t working on stories, you’ll find her writing poetry in a cafe, trying to meditate, or squinting while reading Granta magazine on her phone.
Maria Alexa Kavanaugh (marialexakavanaugh@gmail.com) grew up between the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Colorado’s San Juan mountains. Ultimately she considers the American Southwest her home. After studying poetry and media theory at Pitzer College, she decided to return to New Mexico and teach herself the nuts and bolts of broadcast journalism. This led to an infatuation with audio reporting and a news-casting gig at her local radio station. Since then she has helped launch several podcasts and spent a year working in the Arts and Entertainment department of Southern California Public Radio. When she wasn’t helping produce interviews on film, music, and television, she was blogging about intersectional feminism for Feministing.com. Marialexa also happens to be a licensed NYC tour-guide. She could talk your ear off about early Long Island history and the best craft breweries in Western Queens!
Edith Rousselot (edithrousselot@orange.fr) was born in Clermont-Ferrand, a small city located in the French countryside. After completing high school, she moved to Lille where she received a bachelor’s degree in Political Science at Université Lille II. In addition to her major, Edith pursued a concentration in Journalism at Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme de Lille. Following the successful completion of her bachelor’s degree with honors, she relocated to Bordeaux where she fulfilled the requirements of the first year of the 2-year master’s degree in journalism of the Institut de Journalisme Bordeaux Aquitaine. While studying, she worked in the reportage division of France Inter and France Bleu. There, she was given the opportunity to cover political, cultural and social events, such as the opening ceremony of the Paris Opera season, the evolution of the work code in French overseas territories or, recently, the violent “Yellow Vests” crisis. Furthermore, Edith co-created The News World Tour, a weekly podcast that analyzes news overlooked by the mainstream media.
Literary Reportage 2018
Felicity Cain (aka “Flick”) was born in New York and spent the first 10 years of her life bouncing between living in Connecticut and London – an experience that left her with a warm feeling of home in two countries and a faded accent most often mistaken for a speech impediment. Fresh out of the University of Michigan, Felicity has a B.A. Sociology, with minors in Writing and Environment (naturally). With nothing published and no relevant work experience, she is excited to delve into the world of journalism. Felicity deeply enjoys sarcasm, everything bagels, and laughing in uncomfortable situations. She can be found on twitter @shutupflick.
Mycah Hazel (mycahhazel@gmail.com) was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where she started out writing diary entries and fan fiction she never posted online. Starting college at a majority-white university at the peak of the 2014 #BlackLivesMatter protests, Mycah experienced renewed racial self-awareness but increasingly lost her black card for not knowing what hip-hop songs were popular throughout her college years. She found solace writing about how identity shapes creation and reception of policies in the political realm and art in the entertainment industry. Her work on identity’s intersection with politics, film, education and more has been featured on HuffPost, the Establishment, TRT World and VocaLady Magazine, an online feminist magazine she co-edited throughout college. She has received her Bachelor’s degree in History and Creative Writing from Binghamton University. Mycah also enjoys writing fiction, bike riding and buying concert tickets she cannot afford.
Søren Steensig Jakobsen was born and raised in Herning, a boring, provincial town in Denmark. Perhaps due to the tranquility of his childhood scene, he soon turned his attention to the more abstract. The puzzles of existence and what not. These speculative inclinations led him to undertake a Bachelor’s in Philosophy. When a professor dismissed existentialism as “teenage philosophy”, Søren knew that he would never pursue a career in philosophy. Upon graduation, he worked nearly two years as a caregiver to mentally and physically disabled, while working on applications for Master’s programmes, biographies on NBA-legends, and a coffee-table book on the history of philosophy. His main interests include pretentious literature and cinema, basketball, snowboarding, nachos, the meaning of life, and tentatively trying to discern the correlations between these pillars of human life.
Ryan Krause (krause.ryank@gmail.com) began his journey in an overwhelmingly suburban and homogenous town in the mid-Atlantic. Never quite feeling at home in these surroundings, he fled west as soon as he was able. He spent his undergraduate years at the University of California, Davis, where he excelled in the acquisition of life experience. After earning his degree, Ryan set up shop in the liberal bubble that is San Francisco, working– naturally– for a tech company. Last year, in an effort to contribute his voice to the positive public discourse, especially given the current political climate, he decided to return to his original passions for storytelling and social justice by pursuing a career as a journalist. Through his work, Ryan hopes to amplify underrepresented voices, especially of those in the LGBTQ+ community. Ryan’s other interests include lounging in parks, yoga, and napping at inappropriate times. You can follow him on Twitter @RyanKKrause and Instagram @Krausehause.
Robyn Lanz was born and raised in the sparsely populated and often mispronounced province of Saskatchewan, Canada. She attended the University of Regina and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies and Anthropology. During her undergraduate studies Robyn developed an interest in exploring religious life through the lens of intersectional feminism and postcolonial theory, and the role of religion in contemporary global politics. Having always been politically-minded, Robyn instinctively sought ways to transform her theoretical interests into practical methods for creating positive change in her community. After graduating she became heavily involved in local political activism and quickly landed a job in provincial politics. For the better part of two years Robyn worked for the Official Opposition of Saskatchewan as a Communications Officer with a focus in digital media. In that position she learned a little about writing and a lot about public policy, but now feels ready to move onto new endeavors that may finally afford her the opportunity to write and get published using her own name. When Robyn isn’t working or campaigning, she enjoys biking, baking, and spending time with her partner and two dogs. You can contact her at Robyn.N.Lanz@gmail.com or check out a carefully curated glimpse of her life on IG @robyn_lanz.
Savannah Lucas was born in the bustling African metropolis of Johannesburg. The complexity of culture inherent in this melting pot of urbanity fascinated Savannah and she knew from an early age that she would always want to communicate the complexity of human experience through whichever medium available to her at the time. A love of documenting thoughts through film and a talent in theatre direction evolved into an immense pleasure in writing and research. Savannah moved to Cape Town to do her Bachelor of Arts in English and Psychology and went on to do an honours degree in English Literature. Her research interests have focused on pan-African Literature, music and alternative methods of publishing. Drawn to where the unofficial thrive, she moved back to Johannesburg to work for the maverick publishing company Jacana Media, most recently heading up their self-publishing imprint. Her podcast, Interns’ Insider 2 Publishing looks at the publishing industry in South Africa. New York offers a whole new palette of opportunity.
Kaitlyn Nicholas started things off by growing up in a small town north of Missoula, Montana. There she developed a talent for swimming in very cold water, meandering up peaks, and making spaghetti for ten. After earning an undergraduate degree in English Writing from Montana State University, she went on to work for a library, where she designed a science and arts center for teenagers. The job required her to use and repair all sorts of technology, which developed her fascination in diverse storytelling methods. Kaitlyn (who also goes by Kayt) is interested in refugees and global immigration, particularly the language societies use about them and how that language has shifted and continues to change over time. She is also interested in ice cream of all kinds, beekeeping, and hopes to one day knit a fisherman’s sweater.
Sevindj Nurkiyazova is a journalist from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. At 15, she graduated from high school, ranking #1 in the National Testing. While studying Business Administration in American University of Central Asia, she took classes in journalism and devoured foreign magazines, dreaming, one day, to explore real-life stories of people around her. After graduation, to make her dream come true, she sold her car and her soul — and co-founded Gedonist magazine (later transformed into enot.kg). In the following years, Sevindj wrote, produced, and edited several hundred pieces (in Russian), talking to all sorts of people, from an ex-president (in exile) to ex-cons. With time, the pieces grew longer and longer, the reporting — deeper and deeper, until, last summer, she found herself living in a tiny mountain village 250 miles from home, once again — to learn what it is like to be someone else. Nothing fascinates her more than the stories of other people… Except for random facts that she loves pouring on every poor soul in sight — like why blood is red, shit is brown and how these facts are interrelated. Some random facts about Sevindj herself: She learned reading at the age of 2.5 and read 419 books in the last five years (mostly, non-fiction and science fiction). In 2018, she came fifth in a local climbing championship (out of six contenders). She studied French and Japanese for three years, but it left nothing more than the skill to roll the r’s and an endless pool of random facts about Japan. During her 23rd skydive, she got stuck in the air for 37 minutes, setting Kazakhstan’s record (accidentally).
Jason Stavers has wandered through a variety of professional occupations, including but not limited to financial analyst, management consultant, attorney, and for one brief but glorious winter, ski instructor. Through these changes of title, the work he liked most was learning about new things and then writing about them. Eventually—some might say belatedly—it occurred to him that he could shed the white-collar accoutrements and do just the learning and writing parts. Jason’s previous writing has been published mainly in federal court filings and obscure trade publications, on such captivating topics as CERCLA and 28 U.S.C. § 1782. He has no web site and his Twitter account is dormant, but you can follow his IG @jasonstavers for pictures of his outlandishly adorable dog.
Elizabeth Weissberg graduated from Yale University, where she focused on applied ethics and majored in philosophy. After graduation, she worked at a refugee resettlement agency through AmeriCorps. Next, she taught literature, poetry, American Studies, British Studies, and business English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong while on a Yale-China fellowship. Thereafter, she taught and tutored her way through Yunnan, Zhejiang, Japan, and Southeast Asia, all in all spending five years abroad. Her interests include positive psychology, anthropology, systems science, and pop music, and she is conversational in Japanese and Mandarin. Currently, Elizabeth is working on a book about travel and grief.
Literary Reportage 2017
Jerad W. Alexander began his writing career as a U.S. Marine infantryman and combat correspondent, covering defense and foreign policy adventures and misadventures in the United States, East Africa and Iraq. Since leaving the Marines, Jerad has received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from American Military University where he focused on postwar American literature. Jerad has published fiction and nonfiction on politics, history, American culture, literature, and war with Pithead Chapel, As You Were, The Blue Falcon Review, Military Experience and the Arts, Narratively, Ozy, Esquire and Rolling Stone. His novella The Life of Ling Ling was a finalist in the 2012 Serena Kennedy McDonald Prize, and his essay “On Our Next Stop in Modern War” was a finalist in Narrative Magazine’s 2013 Spring Story Contest against literary luminaries Robert Bausch and the late Joe David Bellamy. Jerad is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Nately’s Magazine. A list of his works with links can be found at www.jeradalexander.com
Benjamin Ethan Brandstein was born in Los Angeles, California. He moved to New York City after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College with a B.A in Literature and Creative Writing. During his undergraduate studies, Ben was so inspired by the works of Dante Alighieri that he lived in Florence, Italy for one year in order to read The Divine Comedy in its original language. There he studied (and is now fluent in) Italian, classical guitar, and anthropology. Since then he has worked for The Strand Bookstore, The Paris Review, Macmillan Publishing, Tony Bennett, and Sterling Publishing. He currently teaches Method Writing, a seasonal eight-week writing course in Manhattan, and is the director of Poetry in Motion, a monthly poetry salon.
Daniel James Cashmere. Most recently from Chicago, DJ Cashmere has also spent time living and studying in New Jersey, Northern Virginia, Germany, Southern California, and England. For the last seven years, DJ has been serving as a teacher at one of the country’s most transformative inner city high schools, where he created a social justice-focused literacy program and became deeply interested in liberation-based pedagogy and education reform. Over the last few years, DJ has also been researching and writing his first book, Every Single Day, a year-in-the-life exploration of his students and colleagues. DJ holds a B.A. in Theatre and an M.A. in Teaching, and is also a graduate of the Second City’s Conservatory and Music Programs. His interests include mindfulness, industry disruption, national politics, theatre, and baseball.
Neel Dhanesha (neel.dhanesha@nyu.edu) grew up in both India and America and has lost track of the number of houses he’s lived in. He has been telling stories for as long as he can remember, though he likes to think his technique has become at least a little more polished in recent years. He studied International Relations and Journalism at Boston University and now lives in (and often writes about and photographs) New York.
Tracy J. Gates has Midwestern roots, a New England childhood, and a Brooklyn mailing address. Graduating from Smith College with a degree in Sociology, she moved to New York City to learn the craft of children’s book editing and how to survive as an outdoors woman in an indoors city. Addicted to athletic activities and adventures, she started a blog squeakyfeet.wordpress.com and has written about sailing across the Atlantic on a leaky catamaran, getting lost on her mountain bike in the Badlands, and searching for the sport of squash in Mongolia. She’s always been interested in women’s relationship to sports and physical activity and looks for stories that will inspire as well as entertain.
A children’s book publishing veteran, Tracy commutes around the city by bike and is always on the lookout for the best taco and beer pairing.
Spencer Green grew up in Texas, graduated from Grinnell College with a B.A. in English, and has since lived in Louisiana and North Carolina. After many years organizing and working with anti-poverty agencies, he is beginning a project documenting the ways communities are using cooperative economics to resist capitalism–particularly in communities or industries where cooperatives are not commonly found. He is a regular contributor for the Ploughshares blog, has written movie reviews for Bloody Good Horror, and co-created What, Like It’s Hard?, a podcast that documents creative collaboration. He is an avid reader and movie lover, and is currently preoccupied with the ideal joint custody arrangement for his two dogs (a two year old pit bull and a fourteen year old lab) between New York and his boyfriend’s home in North Carolina.
Maham Hasan (mahamhasan29@gmail.com) was born and raised in the heart of Punjab, Pakistan as an army brat, ran free at a British school in Saudi Arabia during her early teen years, finished high school and began college at the capital of Oman, and finally graduated a proud Badger and cheese head at UW-Madison, WI in 2016. Despite growing up in a culture that promotes nothing but STEM careers as the only ones worth pursuing and being the first child of a surgeon, Maham has always had an endless appreciation for any and every form of the creative arts. Being tone deaf and unable to draw even a cat, she always came back to words and the stories you tell with them. She was the literature columnist, concert and theater reviewer for “The Daily Cardinal,” one of the oldest student run daily newspapers in the country, for the entire length of her undergraduate career. She also sat on the editorial board of two student run magazines, “Journal of Undergraduate International Studies” and “Illumination – Essays, Art, Poetry” while working as a closet tech expert on campus. Maham used her Psychology major to be involved with research labs that studied discrimination, prejudice and group norms and eventually plans on pursuing her other major of Philosophy into a PhD that she can teach college kids with. She hopes, if that day ever comes, her Literary Reportage training will help her write about the perils of Utilitarianism in a way that makes Philosophy accessible. But ask her that in two years and perhaps the dream of being a Professor will be one of reaching people with nonfiction essays instead, or both. Since graduating, Maham dipped her toe into the corporate world of desk jobs and immediately vowed never to be so foolish again. Contact her at mahamhasan29@gmail.com to hear her gush about returning to the world of academia that she loves endlessly and loves to hate gleefully.
Madysen Luebke was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska and graduated from Columbia University with a degree in American Studies in 2016. Moving to New York, she became everyone’s sole Nebraskan friend, and the only New Yorker her family had ever met. This began her journey to connect these two worlds as an undercover insider. When she’s not reading something by Dostoevsky or attempting to mollify political discussions on Facebook, she is interviewing dancers and choreographers on her podcast, The Conscious Movers, practicing any of the six random languages she has studied, or eating too much lox and acting as a concierge to the LES while working at Russ & Daughters.
Charlotte Norman was born and raised in Hong Kong, and grew up in a Chinese/British family. She has loved reading since she was young and her mother used to reprimand her for reading in cars (“It’ll wreck your eyes”). After studying English Literature at Skidmore College, she moved to Beijing where she stayed for 4 years. She worked a number of jobs, most memorably at an education company that was accused of academic fraud. In her free time, she likes reading and trying new food.
Ngozi Nwangwa was born and raised in Arlington Heights, IL. She goes by the name Shirley, unless you can pronounce her name correctly (she doubts it). Her parents are Nigerian immigrants who moved to the U.S. before having Shirley and her three sisters. She’s queer and proud of it and writes about her intersectional identity, though mostly behind closed doors. Shirley was most recently a chemist in Madison, WI but has always wanted a career telling stories and connecting marginalized people through words and imagery. Shirley has acted in three plays; one while as an undergraduate and two as part of Madison Shakespeare Company. She has a cat named Chicken and listens to podcasts that educate her, enliven her and make her cry laughing. Her first and only published piece will be coming out in July for Our Lives, the local queer magazine in Madison.
Karen Sims (karen.sims.93@gmail.com) (who also goes by Suqi) was born and raised in Taichung, Taiwan to a Floridian father and a Taiwanese mother. She grew up eating cornbread with chopsticks and celebrating Chinese festivals with Southern recipes. Probably because she could never quite grasp it, she likes to explore themes of cultural identity and social belonging in her writing. After graduating from the American School in Taichung, she attended Davidson College in North Carolina, where she developed a love for local microbrews and published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in Exit 30 and Atlantis. She has since moved back to Taiwan for a year, in part to reconnect with her roots, but mainly to eat cheap, delicious street food and to hang out with her parents’ dogs, Niu Niu and Biggie. In her spare time, she writes for a local bilingual food and travel magazine and messes about on her poetry blog: karensimspoetry.wordpress.com
Literary Reportage 2016
Samuel Argyle (argyle.sam@gmail.com) is a 2016 Temple University Graduate of Distinction earning a B.A. in Religion with a minor in Psychology. His thesis titled Biblical Prophets and Their Relationship with the Political Establishment won Temple’s Theodorius R. Gunkenhausen Award for best undergraduate essay in Jewish Studies. His other academic papers cover topics such as gender and hermeneutical analysis of religious texts. Sam began his journalism career in Tokyo, Japan at The Japan Times. This experience abroad furthered his interest in international journalism and politics, specifically religion’s role in globalization. An avid reader of art and literary magazines, Sam also has a passion for music (including an expansive vinyl and CD collection).
Andres Begue (abegue630@gmail.com) graduated in 2013 from Fordham University, studying philosophy and anthropology. He grew up in New Orleans where he returned to live and work after graduation. His interest and introduction to journalism stem from literary theory, documentary filmmaking, and political philosophy. He likes to read and watch movies and TV; hopefully he will write more. With a lifelong fanaticism for sports, he looks to delve into how sports interacts with and impacts a person and community, dictating an understanding of identity and personhood.
Elizabeth Cantrell (lizdcantrell@mac.com) got her start as a journalist in Burlington, Vermont. She has written about all kinds of creative folks and quirky characters, from vintage jewelry restorers and silk-screen t-shirt artists, to honky-tonk crooners and multi-lingual hip-hop performers, to underdog political candidates and Ironman competitors. Liz has also journeyed to the Mayan temples and wet jungles of Belize, trekked to a village in the high-elevation mountains of Lesotho, and hiked and camped her way around the United States. She graduated from the University of Vermont in 2013 with a B.A. in Political Science. Liz is a national park nut, iced coffee enthusiast, and West Wing devotee. You can read her work and follow her adventures at lizdcantrell.com.
Natalie Coleman (Natalie.e.Coleman@gmail.com) graduated in 2016 with degrees in journalism and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati, where she served as news editor and reporter for the independent student newspaper. She has reported on the lives of homeless women and children in Cincinnati, the rise of campus sexual assault, and the changing landscape of campus policing. As an editorial intern at The Wall Street Journal Custom Studios, she continued to write about women, this time within the context of financial inclusion. At NYU, she plans to continue reporting the narratives of homeless and disenfranchised women, as well as explore new possibilities with audio reporting. When she’s not writing, you can find her brewing coffee, taking film photos, or practicing her Italian. Her website is natalie-coleman.com and she tweets at @_nataliecoleman.
J. Oliver Conroy (oliverconroy@gmail.com) graduated from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where he earned a BA with Joint Honours in Political Science and History, and also spent time as a visiting student at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). He lives and works in New York.
On a backpacking trip up the east coast of Africa, Laura Lee Huttenbach met an 87-year-old man in Kenya who told her a story so wonderful she wound up moving to his family’s tea farm on the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya to hear more. The Boy is Gone: Conversations with a Mau Mau General—published by Ohio University Press in June 2015—is the result of their collaboration and Laura Lee’s first book. An Atlanta native and a graduate of the University of Virginia, Laura Lee is excited to keep learning—from professors and classmates at NYU, and from the giant classroom that is New York City. Her website is www.LLHuttenbach.com.
Marina Koslock (marina.koslock@gmail.com) was born in the capital city of Manitoba, Canada. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Winnipeg, in Rhetoric, Writing and Communications. Marina has worked the last three years in Toronto, managing the content for a national hockey charity, as well as working as the Arts & Culture Editor at a start-up magazine in the city. She first discovered New Journalism through her undergraduate mentor, Dr. Robert Byrnes, who introduced her to Didion, Wolfe, and Capote, opening her mind to this fantastic new type of journalism. Her thesis project, inspired by both her parents’ closed case adoptions, will explore the true life stories of adoptees, biological parents, and the children within the system.
Anaka Kaundinya (anaka91@gmail.com) is a ‘big city’ girl of South Indian lineage, who grew up with a wide-eyed amazement for wildlife, theatre and classical dance. In high school she was a cultural exchange student twice around, living with families in Japan and the United States. With somewhat parallel careers as a dancer/actor/voice-over artiste, Anaka became a partner at a non-profit collective called ‘Dear Imagination’ that focused on the arts education of underprivileged children. In 2014, Anaka graduated with a degree in law from Government Law College, Mumbai. Over the next two years, she worked on an assortment of films (ads, shorts, documentaries), continued as a voice-over artiste and produced/directed ‘Island Of Magic’, a 30-minute documentary about the success of a low-income classroom. Somewhere in the middle of this hullabaloo (perhaps because of it), Anaka’s fascination for and love of film, non-fiction and writing began to develop.
Ula Kulpa (uk280@nyu.edu) graduated from the University of Chicago in 2015. She is interested in history, criminal justice, thunderstorms, red bell peppers, and dogs.
Melissa Pinel (mpinelz@gmail.com) was born in Panama just a few days after the U.S Invasion. She started her career as a journalist when she was eighteen and her work has varied from writing about the new wave of Panamanian cuisine to doing a feature length piece on the first transgender woman to obtain a legal name change in the country. She is especially passionate about learning the ins and outs of producing podcasts. Her interest, besides reading and writing, include photography and traveling. During her time at NYU, she plans to write about homelessness in America and about how people deal (or don’t) with the death of the ones they love.
Ryan Sweikert (ryan.sweikert@gmail.com) is a reporter and independent radio producer from upstate New York. He cut his investigative reporting teeth profiling a spree killer and researching an in-depth project on the impact a large factory closure had on a small town. Recently, he has been working mostly in audio, work that has had him hitchhiking across the country, digging into the opiate epidemic, and exploring the internal world of a troubled artist, respectively. He hopes to continue working with audio at NYU, while mastering the art of long form reporting. You can hear some of his work on his PRX page.
Morgan Sykes (morgan.l.sykes@gmail.com) graduated from Brevard College in 2012 with a BA in Religious Studies and English. She hails from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Asheville, North Carolina where she balances her bookworm proclivities with really long mountain bike rides in Pisgah National Forest. She is interested in religious experience, subcultures, hip hop, the context of identity, and eating Middle Eastern food as frequently as possible.
Jacqueline Traore (jacquelinek.traore@gmail.com) is captivated by vivid storytelling. Born in Brussels, with roots in Mali and France, she’s been moving periodically since she was a couple months old. Having spent a large part of her life starting anew in contexts often very different from her own, she’s particularly interested in documenting the lives of individuals who have had to tiptoe around multiple worlds, navigate between multiple cultural identities. At NYU, she plans to write on issues surrounding immigration, integration, and intercultural dialogue, with a specific focus on the lived experiences of the African diaspora. She graduated from McGill University in 2015 with a B.A. in Political Science and International Development.
Tara Yarlagadda (tara.yarla@gmail.com) originally hails from the San Francisco Bay Area. She got her start as a journalist on her high school newspaper, which sparked a lifelong passion for writing. After graduating with a B.A in Political Science and South & Southeast Asian Studies from the University of California at Berkeley in 2014, Tara moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked to support grassroots campaigns at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. While at NYU, she plans to unite her twin interests of social justice and reportage to write in-depth pieces on human rights issues, with a specific focus on immigrants and their unique stories. When not writing, Tara enjoys snacking on Nutella and exploring off the beaten path destinations. Some of her favorite nonfiction books include Wild, Voices from Chernobyl, and Beautiful Thing. Find her on Twitter at @TaraYarla.
Literary Reportage 2015
Kate Essig is native of St. Louis with an interest in writing about social justice, urban issues and spirituality. While at Saint Louis University, Kate worked in the newsroom of St. Louis Public Radio, for Sauce Magazine (a local food and beverage publication), as a blogger for OnSTL.com and as an editor of SLU’s OneWorld Social Justice Magazine. Upon graduation, Kate spent a year teaching English in Denver through the Alum Service Corps, a Jesuit service program. She’s written about how social media helps and hurts student activism, failed baking adventures, low wages for fast food workers and a Tibetan refugee named Tashi Tsomo who wears pink Converse top-siders. You can find her work at kateessig.com.
Carson Frame graduated from the University of South Florida in 2011 with a B.A. in English Literature and International Studies. While in college, she covered local news and politics for WMNF, Tampa Bay’s community radio station. In 2012, she joined AmeriCorps NCCC, a team-based national service organization, and interned at the Albany Free School, which promotes inquiry-based learning and community creation. Carson is fascinated by the process of self-making, especially as it occurs in contexts of social isolation or saturation. She’s both troubled and enthralled by America’s transhumanist urges, as well as the more general, aggressive drive for self-improvement. Carson has written articles and art reviews for Creative Loafing, Chronogram, Metroland, and the Albany Visitors Bureau. She’s the fiction editor for Driftwood Press, an independently published literary magazine.
Zachary Leja received a B.A. in Religion and History from the University of Rochester. Crucial to his growth and education is the time he spent in India, where he volunteered with Mobile Creches, a local ngo, working with pregnant women, new mothers, and their children in the greater Delhi area. He is interested in religion’s dual nature as an instrument of unification and alienation, as well as the role of religion in immigrant families and communities. He hopes to explore these topics further in the Religious Studies/Journalism program at NYU.
Mathew Rodriguez is a queer, Latino, New York city-based journalist, essayist and activist. He is the community editor for TheBody.com, where he writes and edits articles about HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C treatment and prevention. His work has appeared in Slate, The Advocate, Modern Loss, Refinery29, San Diego LGBT Weekly, The Huffington Post and the International Business Times. His essay, “We Must End PrEP Segregation” was featured in the GLAAD Media Award-winning collection “30 Days of PrEP.” He has been recognized as one of the 100 most influential youth in America by POZ Magazine, one of the top 10 most captivating voices in HIV by HIV Equal, and one of 2014’s Top 10 Game-Changers by Mused Magazine. He likes female rappers and is particularly interested in how our bodies dictate how we operate socially, economically, sexually and politically. You can follow him on Twitter at @mathewrodriguez.
Sarah “Aziza” Shihadah’s passion for words extends to nearly every form of writing—aside from the personal bio. But here it goes. A life-long nomad, Sarah has lived and worked in half a dozen countries, and has been fortunate enough to travel through over two dozen others. Raised on both sides of the Atlantic by a Palestinian father and German-American mother, Sarah’s interest in the interplay of religious, cultural, linguistic, and political legacies springs from deep personal roots. Sarah is thrilled to be joining the Lit Rep program where her love of research will combine with her passion for beautiful prose. Sarah graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 with a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies, and spent the 2014-2015 year as a Fulbright Fellow in Amman, Jordan.
Sarah Stodder, a Bay Area native, received her B.A. in Government from Georgetown University. Primed for a life of abstracts and Stata, she set out to conduct research on disaster management as a 2012-2013 Fulbright Scholar in Sri Lanka. When a series of random events landed her an interview with a former member of the Tamil Tigers, she decided to give journalism a try. Two years and many menial jobs later, she’s written about old houses and school integration schemes for San Francisco magazine and chronicled a displacement camp funeral for The Caravan. She’s fascinated with how family heritage is preserved and shed, and she hopes to explore this at NYU by working on the story of a very old house in Rhode Island.
Literary Reportage 2014
Victoria Beale is a journalist who has worked in the UK, Canada and the US. Her most recent reporting project was a story about ten and eleven year old boys tried on conspiracy to murder charges in rural Washington state, for Buzzfeed Longform. David Grann described the article as “Deeply reported, disturbing, important,” and it was chosen as one of The New Yorker’s Weekend Reads. Since graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in English Lit she has written for the New Republic on phone hacking and the London riots, for the Economist on Rebecca West and Greek cinema, as well as for the Guardian on Newcastle, bad literary marriages, and watching the same film every day for a year. She’s also reviewed books for the Financial Times, Independent, and New York Times. For the last year she has been a research assistant to Patrick Radden Keefe, working on background for his articles about mining corruption in Guinea, marijuana legalisation in Washington and Colorado, and more recently pieces on insider trading in New York hedge funds as well as Swiss banks and offshore accounts.
Alex Brokaw received his B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Emory University in 2011. Following school he helped run a literary journal before taking work as a copywriter. Then, after someone asked him if he wouldn’t mind writing a few articles, he began as a financial reporter. The work was enjoyable, and he continued as a reporter on and off for the next two years, covering areas such as agribusiness, global trade, and emerging economies. Somewhere along the line he ran across digital currencies, didn’t pay too much attention, and then, months later came back around. He’s been building his coverage of the emerging space ever since. He’s particularly interested in the impact of the technology behind digital currencies to things that do and don’t have to do with money.
Jaspal Chana is a recent graduate of the University of Durham with a degree in Theology & Religion. During this time he has spent a year living in Sweden, interned at an English language newspaper in Dubai, written a number of commentary pieces for the university newspaper and featured as a fortnightly columnist on a student website writing about the artistic value of various aspects of popular culture. Through his studies he has become particularly interested in the role of religion in the American political system as well as the relationship between personal identity, nation and culture, which he hopes to explore through the religion/journalism program at NYU.
Michelle Kim is a native of South Korea and has worked at the Seoul bureau of Thomson Reuters for the past year. She wrote a number of features on North Korea, especially on the regime’s human rights abuse and the reunion of war-torn families. While interviewing North Korean defectors, she found the lighter conversations they shared just as intriguing as their harrowing accounts of midnight escapes and prison camp atrocities. Their hopes for marriage and family, what school life was like in a democratic society and the new dreams they cultivated—these topics were not shocking news items, but added personality to each of their tales. So during her time at NYU, she hopes to bond with North Korean defectors who may be living in the New York area and write longer, detailed narratives of each individual’s experience. Michelle earned a B.A. in International Studies from Ewha Womans University in 2013, with concentrations in Diplomacy and Asian Studies. She loves the smell of old library books and reading her favorite novels over and over again.
With roots in Washington, D.C. and Stuttgart, Germany, Natalie Lampert has traveled and written her way through thirty countries. Despite this, she still struggles using chopsticks. Natalie received her B.A. in English and International Relations from Elon University in 2011. She has worked in a variety of writing environments, including as a reporter for an Austrian newspaper, as managing editor of her college’s literary journal, and as an intern at a publishing house in Sri Lanka. As a 2012-2013 Fulbright scholar in Sri Lanka, Natalie taught contemporary literature at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura. She works during summer months for National Geographic, leading student expeditions focused on creative writing and photography. At NYU, she plans to write about meditation and its practitioners, exploring the juxtaposition of insight meditation’s increasing popularity in urban epicenters such as New York City and the rise of Buddhist extremism in South Asia.
Hannah McCarthy is a graduate of Bennington College, where she earned her B.A. in Philosophy and Theatre. After completing her thesis work on Brecht and the power of the theatrical event, she became interested in community ritual and the theatrics of religious worship. Writing for the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette, Hannah explored the peculiar rites of the insular year-round community of artists, business owners and fisherman. She spent the following year travelling the U.S. in a beat-up white 2001 Odyssey (named Hal), researching religion and the desire for community across generations and geographies. In the late nights and wee morning hours between farming, fundraising for a couple of non-profits and working as a film producer, Hannah has written about these various microcosms. She intends to continue this work while at NYU, concentrating the shifting liturgical landscape of a spiritually displaced younger generation.
Renee Saleh studied modern literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a concentration that encouraged her study of the literature produced by socially and economically depoliticized ethnic groups. She became increasingly interested in the manifestation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here in the United States, and particularly in the microcosm of New York City. She maintains an open-minded curiosity about the essence of identity and stubbornness inherent to a conflict such as this one, and hopes to eventually write long-form pieces regarding her own identity and relationship to the conflict. Post 9/11 Islamophobia is another interest of hers, as she plans to use that concept as one of many lenses under which she will parse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since graduation, she has had experience working with a couple different non profits, both of which were socio-political by nature and have solidified her desire to combine her love of the written word with greater social issues that have heavily impacted her own world view.
Lindsey Smith struggles to flip pancakes, fried eggs, and other flat things in pans. She can’t dance to save her life, and should stay away from singing in public, for everyone’s sake. Despite these deficits, she graduated from Stanford University in 2011 with a BA in Italian and English: Creative Writing. In 2008-2009, she went to Lecce, Italy as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, where she studied sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology, and (bewilderingly) Spanish at the Università del Salento. There, “in the heel of the boot,” Lindsey was first exposed to the complicated interplay between organized crime and social norms, a relationship that has fascinated her since and will anchor her research at NYU. After graduating, she worked in venture philanthropy in the Bay Area, vetting, selecting, and coaching a portfolio of start-up nonprofits. During that time, she also wrote on topics from family, to football, to books, for literary and philanthropic publications including, most recently, Narrative Magazine. As always, she is eager to learn and do so much more.
In 1986 Giulia Alexandra Smythies was conceived in a small flat in the center of London. For six months prior to her conception, her starving parents had subsisted on nothing but small packets of jaffa cakes. Their baby was born fat and curly-headed, with an unquenchable thirst for chocolate. They named her Giulia, after an Alpine mountain range in Italy, the country of their birth. Without realising it, Giulia grew up confused about her identity. Not only did she speak three languages, have two passports, and live in Alabama, Italy, Seattle, and Germany, but nobody could actually pronounce her name. In 2012 her search for meaning led her to Aboriginal Australia where she connected with Mundanara Bayles and her elders, Lilla Watson and Mary Graham. In a speech given at the 1985 United Nations Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi, Lilla Watson is famous for saying, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound with mine, then let us walk together.” Giulia believes that a society is only as healthy as its sickest member and that as long as there is injustice for some, there will be suffering by all. She is at NYU to learn the art of creating change.
Maggie Whitehead spent the past four years in Baltimore, Maryland working for the International Rescue Committee as a caseworker for newly arrived refugees. While serving a wide refugee client base, she worked closely with trauma victims and wrote individual histories to secure disability status for refugees with psychosomatic conditions. Prior to refugee resettlement, she lived in Tamil Nadu with a dozen mischievous teenage boys, who taught her bad Indian manners and the convoluted nature of English phonetics. Despite years of communicating mainly with limited English speakers, Maggie hopes to regain her vocabulary and put it to use. She is eager to unite her passions for writing and advocacy at NYU, and plans to focus her work around the successes and trials of human migration.
Literary Reportage 2013
Elizabeth Flock <elizabethflock@gmail.com> is a journalist with a deep interest in social issues and foreign news reporting. She has worked at the Washington Post, where she reported on the Arab Spring and authored a foreign breaking news blog, U.S. News & World Report, where she covered the 2012 election and social issues under the Obama administration, and Forbes India Magazine, where she investigated the Gates Foundation’s HIV/AIDs work in India and the collapse of the world’s largest art fund. Elizabeth is also passionate about documentary film. She recently graduated from the Documentary Institute at George Washington University, where she made the film “Leaving Sharpe,” about D.C.’s decision to close a special needs public school. She holds a B.A. from Boston College in English and a certificate from the Film and Television Academy in Prague. She hails from Chicago, where her work has been published in the Chicago Tribune and the University of Chicago Magazine and where from hometown writer and film critic Roger Ebert she learned the importance of humanity in all writing.
Meryl Kremer <meryl.kremer@fandm.edu> is an impulsive narrator with a fondness for fiction and poetic irony. She grew up in Albany, NY, but spent the last four years in Amish country, earning a B.A. in religious studies at Franklin & Marshall College. Her work experience has provided her insight into the dynamics of bagging groceries, teaching mono-skiing, selling cigars, changing diapers, providing emergency medical support, catering dinner parties and interacting with the elderly. On her own time she often reads, fluctuating between feeling enamored and dejected by the plethora of perfect sentences and stories already in existence. At NYU, she plans to write about what she loves: American spirituality as it manifests within a modern, metropolitan setting. You can find her work at www.outsideden.wordpress.com
Alistair Mackay <aldmackay@gmail.com> is a writer with roots in London and Sydney. Having studied history and journalism as an undergraduate at NYU, he has now been in New York for five years and currently lives in Brooklyn. His research has covered topics ranging from the history of the liberal movement in African American politics to the treatment of yellow fever in early 20th century New Orleans. For the past year, Alistair has worked as a researcher and office manager on the upcoming PBS documentary series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, airing in October 2013. He has also worked for Channel 4 News in London and writes extensively on the New York stand up comedy scene. While at NYU for a second time, he hopes to write about the history and future of the medical management of pedophilia in the United States.
Kate Newman’s <kvnewman@gmail.com> first published work was the poem “Worms,” printed by Sesame Street Magazine in 1991. Since then, she has lived, worked, and studied in North and West Africa, Europe, South Asia, Australia, and Latin America. She is a former Watson Fellow and winner of National Geographic Traveler’s Next Great Storyteller Award. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Bard College and an M.A. in International Affairs from Australian National University. In addition to writing, she edits translations for the magazine Suelta and the digital publishing house Traviesa. Kate is pursuing the joint Religion/Journalism concentration at NYU.
Lance Richardson <mrlancerichardson@gmail.com> is a nomadic writer who has spent the past few years working for Australian press in far-flung corners of the world. Building on a Bachelor of Social Sciences (English and Anthropology, Honors I) from the University of Sydney, he has written about topics ranging from cultural sustainability in Lake Turkana, Kenya, to the origins of hip-hop in the Bronx. Along the way he has been stalked by a bear, attended an exorcism, worn a dishdasha, and nearly drowned in bentonite mud. His work appears regularly in outlets such as The Sydney Morning Herald The Australian Financial Review, The Age, and Australian GQ. Over the next few years he will be focusing on the battle between hunting and wildlife conservation in Wyoming and Montana. He is also a photographer. www.freelancerichardson.com.
Laura Smith <lauraelainesmith@gmail.com>, Laura Smith is a native of Washington D.C. and graduated from the University of Virginia in 2008 with a B.A. in English Literature. After college, she researched and wrote the history of a Montessori school and then founded a restaurant, Yola, which she operated and managed for 2 years. After closing the restaurant in 2012, she spent the last year working in Burma and Vietnam for two environmental organizations, while also traveling throughout Southeast Asia and doing freelance writing for Pearson and Splice Today. Her work has appeared in the Washingtonian, Bourgeon Magazine, Splice Today, and Jazz Times. For fun, she writes fiction, which she releases in series on her blog: http://writinginseries.wordpress.com/about/.
Colin Warren-Hicks <colinwarrenhicks@gmail.com>, is a professional journalist who has held reporter positions at multiple daily newspapers including the The Herald-Sun and News & Observer in North Carolina, where he won two AP Walter Spearman awards, recognizing “outstanding writing” by a journalist with two years or less experience, and as of 2022, he was the ‘Family Forward’ reporter for the Pensacola News Journal, part of the USA Today Network.
Meghan White <mew441@nyu.edu> recently earned her B.A. from Northwestern University where she completed majors in Anthropology and Middle East Languages and Civilizations. Los Angeles-born and Houston-raised, Meghan has taken every possible opportunity to travel, studying and volunteering in places including Chile, Guatemala and South Africa. While at Northwestern, her interest in Arabic and the Middle East led her to work at an archaeological site in Israel and study in Jordan, where she consequently developed a severe distaste for American store-bought hummus. Most recently, Meghan traveled to London to research a Muslim women’s empowerment organization and completed a senior honors thesis on the program’s role in identity development for Muslim women living in post-9/11 Britain. When not waiting in line for cronuts, Meghan will spend her time at NYU using her passion for photography and background in fieldwork to bring an anthropological approach to storytelling, focusing her work on Muslim-American identity in post-9/11 New York.
Literary Reportage 2012
Taylor Beck is a scientist-traveler turned journalist from Richmond, Virginia, whose family hails from the lumber town of Chapman, Alabama. Taylor has worked as a teacher in rural Japan, a dream researcher and translator in Kyoto, a memory researcher in St. Louis and Princeton, a science reporter for the Harvard Gazette, a park maintenance tech on the James River, and a house painter in Richmond. He has just completed a one-year masters of science degree in Science Writing at MIT, and is keen now to turn his writer’s eye to topics beyond the lab.
Johnny Bontemps holds a B.S. in Biochemistry from UCLA. He was born in Besançon, France, and grew up in the nearby small town of Pontarlier. He moved to the US at age 17, and has since worked a variety of jobs–in several research labs, in a health food store, as a behavior therapist for children with autism, among others. While at NYU he will be writing about science and culture. One topic he’d like to explore in depth is the biological phenomenon dubbed the “season-of-birth effect”–or the idea that the season in which we’re born may influence our health and behavior later in life.
Though Kelsey Kudak is a Minnesota native, she has a Guatemalan heart. She began translating for medical missions in the Guatemalan highlands at age seventeen, and after more than fifteen teams, decided to call the country home in 2010. Since then, she has taught high school English, ballet, and contemporary dance in Guatemala City. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Minnesota in 2009 with a B.A. in English and dance, and minors in mass communication and art. During college, she was an opinion columnist for the Minnesota Daily and completed a book-length thesis examining the intricacies of the coffee supply chain. Using grants, she met coffee producers along the Guatemalan-Mexican border, picked and processed coffee by hand, and witnessed the enthusiasm of traders and graders. Inspired by her undergraduate research and her life in Guatemala, Kelsey plans to focus her writing on issues of immigration while at NYU. When she isn’t writing or grading papers, she does her crosswords in black ink, and enjoys salsa dancing, the smell of fall air, and a good cup of sustainably grown coffee.
Corrie Mitchell is a recent graduate from Christopher Newport University in Newport News, VA where she earned a B.A. in English with a concentration in journalism. She served as the news editor for the university’s official student-run weekly newspaper, The Captain’s Log, in which she published articles of interest to student readers. Examples of her work include an investigation of students’ illegal sale and use of Adderall during exams and a profile of one Lost Boy of Sudan who fled his war-torn country to the United States where he enrolled as a student at CNU. During her time at NYU, Corrie plans to write on the topic of religious life in the city.
Nicole Pasulka grew up just outside Chicago, lived in Brooklyn for about a decade, and drove across the US two and a half times last year. She’s the 2012 recipient of the Nation Institute’s I.F. Stone Award and a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Her most recent project investigates police harassment of transgender women. Her work has been published in The Believer, Mother Jones, The Globe and Mail, The Rumpus, and Salon. Most recently, she was the Social Media Fellow at Mother Jones magazine.
Nandini Ramachandran is fondest of books and puns. She grew up in Bangalore and graduated law school in 2009. Since then, she has been a copywriter, a consultant, a researcher, a blogger and an occasional essayist. One day she hopes to add ‘novelist’ to that ragtag résumé. While at NYU she will be writing about the varieties of urban experience. She can be found online as chaosbogey.
Amelia Schonbek has written about the Quebec student movement, the Harper government’s cuts to First Nations programs, and poverty among elderly artists. Until recently she lived in Montreal, where she was an editor at Maisonneuve, an award-winning general-interest quarterly. While at NYU she will be writing about policing.
After graduating from the University of Dayton with dual degrees in English and Adolescent to Young Adult Education, Molly Socha has held an array of occupations. She worked in the REO management division of a law firm in Chicago, Illinois; coached and taught high school English and language arts to urban, low-income students in a rural environment outside of Houston, Texas; and filled the role of grant writer, teacher, recruiter, and event planner for a Catholic, all-girls school in Chicago, Illinois. Along with these various jobs, she has written irregularly for Examiner.com as the Chicago, Post-College life Examiner. Molly looks forward to advancing her career as a writer through her studies at NYU and will be focusing her writing on literature of the past and present and the human response to it.
Amanda Waldroupe is an award-winning journalist and writer from Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in the Oregonian, The Lund Report, the city’s street newspaper, Street Root, and a variety of other weeklies and monthlies. She’s watched a heroin addict shoot up, sat through a cheese making class, covered the 2011 and 2012 Oregon legislative sessions and has written about state Medicaid reforms and the development of the state’s health insurance exchange, but has never written about coffee or bikes. She studied documentary writing at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and has a B.A. in philosophy from Reed College.
Literary Reportage 2011
Sean Patrick Cooper will be writing about the New York music business and urban tennis communities while at NYU. His work has appeared in The Millions, The Rumpus, 3 Quarks Daily, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Pop Matters, & other places too. He is online @ Seanpatrickcooper.com
Will Hunt is writing about humanity’s deep-rooted, irrational relationship with caves, catacombs, tunnels and other mysterious spaces underground and out of sight. The project is based on a year-long Thomas J. Watson Fellowship during which he traveled to 13 countries around the world, exploring subterranean spaces and documenting the myths and legends attached to them. He has contributed to DISCOVER, Outside, Men’s Journal and Rolling Stone. Born in Providence, RI, he has a B.A. in English and Portuguese from Middlebury College. He lives aboveground in Brooklyn. Find him online at willhunt.net.
Aaron Labaree studied English at Oberlin College. Since then, he has worked in publishing, editing, and politics. He plans to write about education reform while at NYU.
Per Liljas has for the past four years only been back in his native Sweden during the light, (comparatively) warm summers. The rest of this time, when not daydreaming about pickled herring, he has spent freelancing for Swedish publications from Latin America, South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. During his time at NYU he will be writing about poverty reduction programs in New York. He has a B.A. in Social Anthropology and can be found online at www.perliljas.net.
Simen Saetre is a citizen of Oslo, Norway. He has worked for several Norwegian newspapers, but has since 2004 been a staff reporter at the cultural weekly Morgenbladet. He holds a B.A. in International Studies from the City College of New York, and a M.A. in European Journalism Studies from Cardiff University. He has written three nonfiction books: Den lille stygge sjokoladeboka (2004), Hugo (2006) and Petromania (2009).
Cody Upton has written about banned art, wastewater treatment in north Brooklyn, and land-use disputes in the coastal ranges of Santa Barbara, California, where he grew up. He studied history and architecture at Columbia University, and has lived in New York since 2001. At NYU he hopes to explore the interface between nature and the city.
Matthew Wolfe will be writing about deviance and its correction, with a particular focus on inmate re-entry . He recently moved back to New York after spending 18 months in Detroit. He has B.A. in art history from Columbia University and has worked as a reporter for a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn; an associate editor for a federal policy newsletter in Washington, DC; an copy editor for a oil and gas trade publication; and a video store clerk. His writing has appeared in The Nation, the Detroit Metrotimes, In These Times and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
Literary Reportage 2010
Khristopher J. Brooks is a veteran education journalist from Wayne County, Michigan who began his journalism career in 2000. Voted as one of the nation’s best beat bloggers, Brooks is a former Associated Press writer, and has had his byline published in newspapers and magazines across the country. Before entering graduate school, Brooks worked as the state higher education reporter for the Omaha World-Herald and the higher education reporter for the Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier. Brooks has received countless hours of training in education writing, research and policy analysis from the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media and the Education Writers Association. He holds a B.S. in News/Editorial Journalism and General Political Science from Central Michigan University. For fun, he likes to travel, exercise, toy with small electronics and pretend he’s a page designer.
Jessica Campbell has been reliving the traumas of adolescence for the past five years as a middle school and high school English teacher in Brooklyn, NY. She entered the New York City Teaching Fellows in 2005 and subsequently earned her MS in Teaching from Pace University. Jessica loves her students and the art of education; but, in the process of helping her students craft their writing, she realized she was sacrificing her own. Ergo, the full-time pursuit of journalism. Jessica graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a dual BA degree in Creative Writing and Classical Studies. During her years as an undergraduate, she wrote for The Daily Pennsylvanian, 34th Street Magazine, Merrick Life, and interned at Harper’s Bazaar. In her non-existent free time she cooks large batches of vegetarian food, fashions intricate itineraries for trips to Acadia, Varenna, and Sedona, and ponders the significance of New York’s ubiquitous psychics.
Kristi Goldade spent the past two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in eastern Ukraine. She taught English and started a journalism center, but mostly, survived cold weather in her dacha. Kristi earned a B.A. in English and a concentration in social justice from the University of Minnesota. While there, she wrote stories for the university’s web and print publications, as well as grants for an avant-garde space, Bedlam Theatre. She grew up in the Red River Valley and still has a soft spot for small towns. This summer she’s a janitor for a local technical college. When she’s not shampooing carpets, she’s outside on a bike.
Dan Kedmey graduated from Carleton College with a B.A. in Economics. Since then, he has worked as a research analyst at a consulting firm in Washington D.C., and then as Director of Assignment Strategy at Teach For America, a not-for-profit organization based in New York. No one ever fully understood what he did for a living, despite his best efforts to explain it to them. Their attention would wander as soon as he mentioned the word “data.” While he is proud of the skills he has developed in Excel over the past four years, he looks forward to closing the spreadsheets this summer and enrolling in the literary reportage program at NYU. When Dan isn’t crunching numbers, he enjoys walking through Manhattan, thirty blocks at a time, and searching for restaurants that can satisfy his cravings for certain kinds of junk food.
Andrea Muñoz lived in Santiago until she moved to California in mid 2008. She holds a B.A. on Philosophy from Universidad Católica de Chile and worked on David Hume’s epistemology for her thesis project. A contributor for El Sábado, a supplement to the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio, she gravitates toward stories about immigration. She enjoys German boardgames and is currently trying to convince her neighbors of uniting efforts on buying a cow so she can learn how to make her own cheese.
Heather Rogers grew up in the border town of El Paso, Texas, where she developed the nerve she’d need to be a freelance journalist. She earned a degree in studio art and went on to day jobs in construction and with homeless youth. Teaching herself how to use a video camera she made a short documentary on garbage in 2002. Much to her surprise the project expanded into a book, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (The New Press 2005). Her second book, Green Gone Wrong (Scribner 2010), takes on the myth that we can buy our way out of environmental crisis. Her byline has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, and The Nation. Her reporting has taken her everywhere from organic farms and eco-villages to dusty rural India and the rainforest on Borneo. On days off she can be found wandering through museums, watching films, and cooking with friends.
Elaine Stuart was most recently the senior associate features/travel editor at Modern Bride, enjoying far-flung assignments in Tahiti and Turkey until Condé Nast closed the magazine last fall. Before that she worked at Child and interned at New York. As a freelancer, she has contributed to a number of national, regional and digital publications. She holds a B.A. in English and Psychology from Georgetown University, where she was a member and co-director of the student dance company and wrote her honors thesis on contemporary dance criticism. Prior to college, she attended high school for ballet at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and danced with the Charleston Ballet Theatre and Richmond Ballet.
Literary Reportage Bios – 2009
Patrick Arden just left a job as a senior reporter at Metro New York. For nearly a decade, he was the managing editor of the Chicago Reader, a pioneer of the alternative-newsweekly movement. He’s also been the editor-in-chief of Illinois Times, a winner of a general excellence award from the Illinois Press Association. He has published stories at Salon.com, the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Post, and other places.
Marianne Do was born in Melbourne, Australia, and raised in Saudi Arabia until she moved to Houston, Texas at the age of eleven. She graduated from the University of Houston with a degree in Architecture, and dedicated a couple of summers to teach high school students how to design buildings (not that she really had the credentials to do so). She has a weakness for makeshift shelters, hand-crafted signs, and odd renovation projects.
Katherine Don holds a B.A. in biological anthropology from Northwestern University. After graduation she meandered about in indecision, initiated short-lived careers in publishing, nonprofit management, and social work, and freelance wrote for books published by such houses as Publications International and St. Martin’s Press. She believes that effective journalism must always couple with compelling narrative, and looks forward to the opportunity to prove this premise through her own writing. She is easily and overly amused by phenomena such as the triple consecutive appearance of “in,” sentence two above.
Clara Kim graduated from Columbia College, with B.A. in English literature and a visual art minor. After college, she went back to Korea, the country she grew up in, and spent the past two years traveling around the coastal villages, teaching English at a North Korean refugee school, and working as a freelance translator. Curious about the way people dress and write, she is also loves drawing out the natural storyteller in others.
Andrew Marantz tried a bit of everything at Brown. His interest in philosophy led him to India, where he learned Vedic epistemology and how to eat with his hands. His interest in cognitive science led him to Nepal, where he worked on a hypoxia study at Everest Base Camp. His interest in the politics of mass incarceration led him to an upstate New York prison town, which then became the subject of his undergraduate thesis. After college, he followed the herd to Brooklyn, where he worked as a freelance journalist, researcher, and conversation starter, writing for such places as Slate, Heeb, and Time Out New York. Andrew thinks the four most overrated things in life are bars, World War II movies, Sonic Youth, and home fries.
Marta Martínez-Martínez studied Journalism at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona because she wanted to write. Thanks to New Journalism she discovered that literary techniques were a great tool to explain our complex world. Unfortunately, Spain offers few opportunities for in-depth reporting, not even in important media such as El País, where she interned. Not wishing to stay in the same place for a long time, she went to live in Berlin and travelled constantly because of her work at a tourism magazine. New York is her new boot camp, where she will look for stories about immigration and generational conflicts, especially between women.
Robert Moor completed his B.A. in Literary Arts at Brown University. Though his studies mostly consisted of writing strange, genre-bending fiction (with literary revolutionaries like Robert Coover and Thalia Field) and fiery, student-activist journalism (contributing to and editing the College Hill Independent, the weekly Brown/RISD student newspaper), his best work strives to combine the experimental spirit of postmodern literature with the factual constraints of journalism. He is currently thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail.