2020-2021

Cedar Attanasio

Cedar Attanasio covers the New Mexico Legislature for The Associated Press where he concentrates on education and poverty. “I was born in a teepee and grew up off the grid,” he says. Among the pine—and, yes, cedar—forests of Northern New Mexico, Attanasio didn't have a television. "The first news story I ever saw was in a copy of Newsweek. I was kind of news starved, scrounging through old stacks of National Geographic," he says, adding “I have organized three community circuses. The first was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I taught teens my age how to stilt walk.” A New Mexico native, Attanasio covered immigration for The AP from its bureau in El Paso, Texas and also covered the mass terrorist shooting in the border city. He’s a graduate of the Santa Fe Tutorial School, the Li Po Chun United World College of Hong Kong and Middlebury College, where he earned a bachelor's degree in geography and Spanish.

Nada Samir Atieh

Nada Atieh is a reporter for the Redding Searchlight in Redding, California, which covers areas north of Sacramento. She focuses on education, childhood trauma and the achievement gap. An Arab-American journalist from Dallas, Texas, Atieh has been working as a journalist in the Middle East since 2017. She has reported on the military escalation in northwest Syria and the humanitarian crisis created by the Syrian civil war within Syria. Previously, she trained with Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), where she coordinated the awards distribution at the 2018 annual conference. She has reported about the economic climate in Jordan for Venture magazine. Atieh has also covered the Jordanian government’s initiative to bring employment services to refugee camps, the impact of tax hikes on food producers in Jordan, and the growth of air connectivity throughout the Middle East. She is fluent in conversational Arabic and proficient in Modern Standard Arabic. She holds a B.A. from the University of Texas at Arlington, where she studied broadcast journalism and communications.

Milton Arline

Milton “Trey” Arline reports for The Daily Herald in Arlington, Illinois, where he focuses on central Lake County and its underserved, underreported minority community. Arline is a graduate of the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He has been consistently writing stories for his school’s newspaper, The Scarlet and Gray Free Press, since he went to UNLV in late 2018, with stories ranging from politics to health, jobs to entertainment. His work can also be found in The Nevada Independent, where he was an intern, and has worked on behalf of PBS, The Associated Press, and NBC on a short-term basis. Born in southern Georgia, Arline grew up a military brat and has lived in Germany, Portugal and Turkey.

Kassidy Arena

Kassidy Arena covers the Iowa statehouse for Iowa Public Radio, focusing on undercovered issues of interest to the booming Latino population. She helped cover global human rights violations and conditions during her internship at RUIDO Photo in Barcelona, Spain. She was a host, producer, and reporter for KBIA, the NPR member station in Columbia, Missouri. During the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kassidy continued to report remotely for Missouri News Network about state issues and politics. Kassidy graduated from the University of Missouri/Columbia with a degree in convergence radio reporting and producing in May 2020. She is originally from Berkeley, California but grew up in Omaha, Nebraska.

Hibah Ansari

Hibah Ansari reports for Sahan Journal, a news organization based in Minnesota’s capital, St. Paul, that focuses on the state’s immigrants. At Sahan Journal, Ansari covers immigration policy, especially affecting Hmong, Somali, and Latino communities. Born and raised in Wisconsin, she holds a master of science degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism student. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Previously, she was a reporting intern for USA Today Network in Wisconsin and Fox Cities Magazine in northeast Wisconsin. She has also contributed to the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.

Bryan Anderson

Bryan Anderson covers the North Carolina statehouse for The Associated Press where he focuses on health care, education, and politics. Most recently, Anderson was a political reporter for The Sacramento Bee where he created and hosted the “California Nation” podcast and received an award for his investigation of numerous breakdowns of California’s Department of Motor Vehicles automatic voter registration program. He was an investigative reporting fellow for News21 where he unearthed information on how little polluters have spent to clean up the nation’s superfund sites. Anderson has won a slew of awards including being a Regional Finalist for a Society of Professional Journalist General News Reporting honor. He was an enterprise manager for the student paper at Elon University and wrote stories for North Carolina publications including The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer.

Farnoush Amiri

Farnoush Amiri covers the Ohio statehouse for The Associated Press, where she concentrates on issues related to abortion, gun control and opioids. She’s worked at The AP in New York City, helping with the wire’s global response to the coronavirus pandemic. Before joining The AP, she worked as a digital reporter at NBC News, where her reporting on Hurricane Maria took her to Puerto Rico to cover the problems with federal aid in San Juan. Farnoush graduated with her master’s degree from New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in early 2019. Born in Iran, Farnoush grew up in southern California and began her journalism career as a stringer for The Orange County Register. She serves on the board of the South Asian Journalists Association.  

Graham Ambrose

Graham Ambrose is a reporter for the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. Based in Louisville, Ambrose focuses on the underreported problems with youth services throughout the Bluegrass State. Ambrose covered the Iowa presidential caucuses for the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa. Previously he covered the fallout from the worst-ever flood of the Mississippi River and the hollowing out of the rural and industrial Midwest for the Dispatch-Argus, a newspaper in East Moline, Ill. He was an intern at The Boston Globe and The Denver Post. Graham has worked as a speechwriter, a public records redactor and a physics tutor, but his favorite job was youth baseball umpire. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University, where he graduated summa cum laude.

Emily Allen

As a city hall reporter for the Grand Forks Herald, Emily has spent the last year covering government and politics for communities throughout northeast North Dakota and northwest Minnesota. Earlier, she interned at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and American Public Media, where she helped produce APM podcasts like Brains On, a science podcast for kids. She earned her B.A. from the University of Minnesota. Covering state government and southern West Virginia Emily is based in Charleston, the state capital, where she helps cover the legislative session at the start of the year. She works primarily in audio. Outside of the legislative session, her focus is in the southern coalfields and other rural counties that have been identified as distressed by the Appalachian Regional Commission.

Alex Acquisto

Alex has been a reporter at the Bangor Daily News in Maine, first covering the state’s lobster and tourism industries on the midcoast, then leading the paper’s metro coverage in Bangor, before finally reporting on Maine politics in the state capital. She has uncovered problems with the Legislature’s mandatory sexual harassment training that led to the ousting of its trainer, and her reporting on the deaths of children in Maine, prompted a legislative investigation into the state’s over-burdened child services agency. Her work has earned her several first place awards in education, news analysis, and law enforcement reporting from the Maine Press Association. Born and raised in Kentucky, Alex first spent time in Maine as a canoe instructor and returned to study writing. She has also reported for the Kennebunk Post and the Forecaster, and she was a teaching artists at The Telling Room, a non-profit organization that teaches storytelling skills to Maine youth. Alex is a graduate of Western Kentucky University and the Salt Institute of Documentary Studies. Watchdog reporting on public health in Kentucky Alex focuses on the region’s health problems, exposes flaws in Kentucky’s social services programs, gives voice to people struggling to care for themselves and their loved ones and offers potential solutions to problems that have plagued the area for a century. In particular, Alex serves as a watchdog of the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, a government agency that wields enormous power over Kentucky’s most vulnerable citizens with  little scrutiny and transparency. She is based in Lexington, but spends extensive time in the Capitol bureau, especially during legislative sessions, and reports from communities in Eastern Kentucky.  She is directed by the newspaper’s deputy editor for accountability and engagement, who has overseen numerous award-winning projects and guides the paper’s coverage of state government and Appalachian Kentucky.