2020-2021

Ali Oshinskie

Ali Oshinskie reports for Connecticut Public, the Constitution State’s only statewide public media resource and home to Connecticut Public Television and Connecticut Public Radio. Her focus is on the Naugatuck River Valley and the issues that affect blue-collar workers there. The Report for America assignment is terra firma for Oshinskie, who grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut. She has produced live radio shows at every hour of the morning between 2 a.m.and 10 a.m. during internships and fellowships for New Hampshire Public Radio, Marketplace Morning Report and Connecticut Public Radio. She has written for The Hartford Courant and Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s The Arts Paper, and she has produced for Wondery’s Business Wars Daily and the New England News Collaborative’s weekly program “NEXT.” Later this year, her writing will be published in “Fast Funny Women,” an anthology of essays. After completing her undergrad at the University of Connecticut, Oshinskie founded a podcasting company, PODSTORIES. Most recently she was a program coordinator for the Yale School of Nursing.

DeAsia Sutgrey

DeAsia Sutgrey covers East St. Louis for the Belleville News-Democrat in Belleville, Ill. She has been an intern and fellow for The Nation, VICE and the Detroit Free Press and blogged on culture for Blavity, a media company created by and for black millennials. At The Nation, she was part of the magazine’s “Vision 2020 Project” reporting on how young people are approaching the 2020 presidential election. She’s due to graduate in 2020 from the University of Kansas’ William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, with a B.S. in Journalism with a minor in African and African-American Studies. Additionally, Sutgrey was a reporter for The University Daily Kansan, the University of Kansas’ student newspaper, for four years.

Michelle Liu

Michelle was a reporting intern for the Toledo Blade, and a general assignment intern for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. As a reporter for the Yale Daily News and a contributing reporter for the New Haven Independent, she shadowed canvassers in New Hampshire and covered labor unions in Connecticut. She was also a program coordinator for Yale’s Summer Journalism Program for high school students. Since joining Report for America, Liu has covered criminal justice for Mississippi Today. The Institute for Non-Profit News named Michelle’s reporting on the spike of prison deaths in Mississippi as one of the “Best in Nonprofit News” in 2018. Her continued reporting on this and other stories not only helped lead the MDOC to invite the FBI to get involved in the investigation of these deaths, but her dogged records requests were cited by the Department of Corrections while asking the Legislature to exempt agencies from parts of the Public Records Act. More recently, the Mississippi Humanities Council invited Michelle to moderate a panel titled, “Locked Up: Criminal Justice in Mississippi.”

Casey Smith

Casey Smith covers the Indiana Legislature with a focus on state elections and education for The Associated Press. Before her time at The AP she focused on the environment, law enforcement accountability and juvenile justice as a graduate research fellow at the Investigative Program in Berkeley, Calif. She has had internships and fellowships at The Indianapolis Star, the Investigative Reporting Workshop in Washington, D.C., The Washington Post, National Geographic, USA Today and other publications. Internationally, she has reported on water quality across South America. Casey holds a master’s degree in investigative reporting and narrative science writing from the University of California/Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. She previously earned degrees in journalism, anthropology and Spanish from Ball State University in Indiana, where she also served as editor-in-chief of the school’s independent student newspaper, The Daily News. Her work has been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists, the Hoosier State Press Association, the Associated Collegiate Press, the Indiana Collegiate Press Association and the German-American Fulbright Commission.

Piper Hudspeth Blackburn

Piper Hudspeth Blackburn covers the Kentucky statehouse for The Associated Press, where she concentrates on issues affecting Appalachia. Before joining Report For America, Hudspeth Blackburn covered politics in Washington, D.C. for audiences in upstate New York and Texas while a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Medill D.C. program. She grew up in Burlington Township, New Jersey, and graduated cum laude with a B.A. from the University of Southern California, where she majored in journalism and history, focusing on past and present intersections of policy, race and mass media in downtown Los Angeles. She was designated a Renaissance Scholar by the university and is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists. She received a graduate degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern in May 2020.

Anna Nichols

Anna Nichols covers the Michigan statehouse for The Associated Press, concentrating on roads, bridges and other ailing infrastructure in this Rust Belt state. The state capital is familiar terrain for Nichols, a graduate of Michigan State (in East Lansing) where, as a student journalist for the campus paper, The State News, she won national attention for her work on the sexual assault corruption scandal that engulfed USA Gymnastics and led to the conviction of team physician Larry Nassar. She has also covered welfare and criminal justice for the Michigan Advance, where she developed the paper’s human welfare beat. A veteran of local news coverage, Nichols was also a reporting Intern for MLive, and the Saginaw News & Bay City Times. Her awards include the Society of Professional Journalists Detroit Chapter 2018 Lawrence A. Laurain Scholarship, being named Michigan Press Association 2018 Foundation Scholar and winning the National College Media 2018 “Best of Show” print issue centerpiece.

Leah Willingham

Leah Willingham covers the Mississippi Legislature for The Associated Press where she concentrates on poverty issues. Before this, she reported for the Concord Monitor in N.H. and holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Mount Holyoke College. She was named the New England Newspaper and Press Association’s ‘Rookie of the Year’ in 2018 and has won two New England News & Press Association’s Publick Occurrences Awards in 2018 and 2019, one for a project on younger-onset Alzheimer’s, and another on teen suicide prevention. She was part of a group of Monitor reporters that won first place in investigative reporting from NENPA in its 2019 Better Newspaper Competition. The stories followed how local school district officials handled reports from students about a teacher arrested for sexual assault. Willingham is the recipient of the 2018 National Alliance for the Mentally New Hampshire Annual Media Award and two New Hampshire Press Association first place awards for health reporting and general news.

Iris Samuels

Iris Samuels covers gubernatorial and congressional elections in Montana for The Associated Press. Based in Helena, the state capital, she also covers policy issues that bear on the lives of the state’s one million citizens who face a dearth of statewide coverage. No stranger to the West, Samuels reported and investigated stories on local government, education, and healthcare for the Kodiak Daily Mirror in Alaska. It’s a world away from Israel, where she was raised and completed her mandatory military service as an intelligence analyst. (Samuels is a dual American and Israeli citizen who speaks Arabic, English, French, and Hebrew.) She is a summa cum laude graduate from Princeton where she won the John McPhee Award for Independent Journalism for her on-scene coverage of the refugee crisis in Europe based on interviews in Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Germany. In college, she also covered education for regional news outlets including public radio station WHYY in Philadelphia and penned a column for the Daily Princetonian.

Camille Fassett

Camille Fassett is a data reporter for The Associated Press based in the San Francisco Bay area. Most recently, she was a data science fellow at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, where she applied statistical analysis and machine learning to public interest data. Previously, Fassett was a reporter and researcher at Freedom of the Press Foundation, where she covered surveillance, whistleblowers and transparency issues, and co-ran the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a data project tracking press freedom violations. Fassett also covered the attacks on press freedom in Malta. She is also a member of the data and security collective Lucy Parsons Labs and a board member of the data archival group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOS). She graduated from the University of California/Berkeley.

Chris Jones

Christopher Jones was a reporter for 100 Days in Appalachia where, as a digital and forensic reporter, he focuses on white supremacists and their disinformation campaigns.  A United States Marine Corps veteran, who served four years in the infantry and as a machine gun squad leader in Afghanistan, Jones was also an EMT in Pittsburgh. As a freelance photojournalist, he’s covered the war in Afghanistan as well as political and breaking news coverage in the U.S. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and The Village Voice. In 2019 he worked as a monthly contributor for Pacific Standard magazine.