2020-2021

Latisha Jensen

Latisha Jensen reports for Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon, where she covers political representation on the city’s East Side. Jensen moved to Portland following graduation in May 2019 from Washington State University. She became a part of the freelance team for Street Roots, a local weekly publication focused on homelessness and underserved communities. During her senior year at WSU, she helped edit an annual university publication, the Visitor Magazine, and also freelanced writing. In the meantime, she was working on an investigative piece published in The Spokesman-Review about a young woman incarcerated for illegal substance abuse and distribution. The piece, which touched on the regional and national opioid crisis, was a finalist for a Society of Professional Journalists award in the General News Reporting category. Also during her final year, she was one of six students selected to go abroad during spring break for a journalism trip to Guatemala, where she was able to use her Spanish-speaking skills, which she also honed during study abroad in Grenada, Spain.

Adrienne Underwood

Adrienne Underwood covers coronavirus recovery for the Ledger-Enquirer in Columbus, Georgia. Underwood has worked as a journalist in New Orleans since 2015, most recently as a stringer at the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate and Gambit Weekly. She has reported on homeless encampments, real estate, housing protests and other aspects of the housing crisis in the city. She’s also covered features, food & drink, entertainment, art and more. While attending Tulane University, she served as part of the digital content team at the New Orleans Advocate, during which time the newsroom won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage on non-unanimous jury laws in Louisiana. Underwood contributed to The Advocate’s digital coverage of Hurricane Barry, Catholic church sex abuse scandals, and the infamous Nola no-call, the missed call during the NFC championship last year between the New Orleans Saints and the Los Angeles Rams. As a student journalist at the Tulane Hullabaloo, she covered everything from student government to drug use on campus. She earned her B.A. in political science and English from Tulane University. She grew up in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

Sam Ogozalek

Sam Ogozalek reports for The Island Packet in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He covers economic development in Jasper County, South Carolina, which is seeing burgeoning growth as new residents, many of them retirees from out of state, settle in this historically African-American area. Ogozalek covered cops, courts and local government during internships at the Tampa Bay Times, The Buffalo News, and the Naples Daily News. An investigative reporter who is adroit at FOIA and other document requests, Ogozalek uncovered conflicts of interest while as an intern in Naples on a design review board in a nearby town that led to a proposed new ethics ordinance. He recently assisted with FOIA research at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. He was the 2018-19 editor-in-chief of Syracuse University’s independent student newspaper, The Daily Orange. Ogozalek grew up in Hancock, New York, a small town along the Delaware River.

Seyma Bayram

Seyma Bayram covers minority and immigrant communities for the Akron Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio. Previously, Bayram was a staff reporter at the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Mississippi, where she covered local government and criminal justice. Her reporting on Mississippi’s sentencing laws and efforts to prevent the state from demolishing a Jackson landmark earned Bayram two first-place awards from the Associated Press. She was an invited speaker to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s 2020 Sharing Knowledge Conference on a panel about the intersection of public health and mass incarceration. Before journalism, Bayram worked as a high-school writing teacher in Brooklyn, New York, and as a book editor for a European experimental arts non-profit organization, where she collaborated on several anthologies that examine the role of culture in contemporary political movements. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s School of Journalism and she received an M.A. and B.A. from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She is from the Kurdish region of Turkey and was raised in The Netherlands and upstate New York.

Laurence Du Sault

Laurence Du Sault covers childhood poverty in San Jose and the Bay Area as part of “The California Divide” project. Before coming to the Mercury News she covered the coronavirus pandemic as a stringer for the New York Times and as a researcher for the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Previously, she investigated police criminality for the IRP as part of a statewide coalition of news organizations examining California law enforcement. Du Sault is a recipient of the Society of Professional Journalist’s James Madison Student Journalist Freedom of Information Award, a fellow for the National Institute for Climate Education, as well as a recipient of the Randy Shilts Award for Exceptional Reporting. At Berkeley, she wrote magazine features on the environment and Indigenous affairs, reporting from Native American communities in the Golden State. After completing an internship at CIBL 101,5, public radio in Montreal, Du Sault lived and freelanced in Mexico for a year, where she perfected her Spanish and taught children in Mérida. She grew up in a strictly French-speaking home in Canada and moved to Australia at 18 to learn English. She is a graduate of McGill University in Montreal. 

Maria Sestito

Maria Sestito reports for The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California, where she focuses on issues facing the areas exploding senior citizen population. Before earning her master’s degree at the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in May 2020, Sestito was the public safety reporter at the Napa Valley Register. While there, she covered murder trials and the North Bay Wildfires. She also started her own lifestyle column called “Jersey Girl.” Before moving to California, Sestito worked at The Daily News in Jacksonville, N.C. as a photographer and general assignment reporter. She is originally from New Jersey and received a B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Rutgers University in 2012. Sestito has won several California News Publishers Association awards for Best Writing, Best Column, and Breaking News. She is a recipient of the U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship for the study of Arabic and a Bloomberg-UNC-Berkeley Business Journalism Diversity Fellow. At Berkeley, she won the Dean’s Merit Fellowship.  

Elizabeth Moomey

Liz Moomey reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky where she focuses on watchdog reporting in eastern Kentucky, specifically Pike County. She was a reporter for the Salisbury Post in North Carolina where she covered the city and politics, along with the town of Landis. Her reporting sparked an embezzlement investigation into two town employees. She previously worked at the North State Journal as a reporter and page designer. Moomey has been awarded by the North Carolina Press Association for feature writing, news enterprise reporting and design. She was also a sports clerk and writer for the News & Observer and a web producer for Spectrum News, both in Raleigh, North Carolina. Liz was the editor of North Carolina State University’s yearbook Agromeck, which won the Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s Gold Crown award. She is a graduate of North Carolina State University and serves on the annual publications advisory board helping to select the incoming editor of the yearbook and literary magazine.

Madeleine Cook

Madeleine Cook is a photojournalist with the Ledger-Enquirer in Columbus, Georgia, where she concentrates on the Covid-19 pandemic and its fallout. Originally from Georgia and North Carolina, she holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from George Washington University/Corcoran School in Washington, D.C. There, she was a Luther Rice Fellow in refugee studies and a Shatz Scholar in Photography in Jerusalem and also graduated magna cum laude. As an undergraduate, Cook interned at USA Today Visuals, NPR's Science Desk, Agence France-Presse and The Morning Call based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. After graduation, she drove cross-country to be a Pulliam Fellow at the Arizona Republic, and then to Salem, Oregon, where she was a photojournalist at the Statesman Journal taking on daily photo and video assignments, producing galleries and covering the long-term impact of homelessness in Oregon. She is an Eddie Adams Workshop XXXII 2019 Participant.

Adam Wagner

Adam has worked for six years at The Wilmington StarNews in North Carolina covering local government, public safety, criminal justice and the environment. Since late 2016, his reporting has focused on water contamination in eastern North Carolina, while he has also covered Hurricanes Florence and Matthew and their aftermaths. He’s won awards for investigative and enterprise reporting from the North Carolina Press Association, the D.C. Press Association and the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania. Adam is a graduate of Ohio University, where he was managing editor of the school paper. Watchdog reporting on Hurricane Florence recovery in Raleigh, North Carolina The News & Observer is dedicated to covering the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, which destroyed lives, homes and businesses around North Carolina.  Adam is assigned to the newsroom’s ongoing efforts to cover cleanup, rebuilding and revitalizing communities following Hurricane Florence — a process that will take years. His primary focus is  investigating and reporting on how last year’s disaster disproportionately affects low-income residents and people of color in North Carolina. He works closely with our data journalist and three other reporters who are covering the flood’s aftermath. Adam reports directly to one of the newsroom’s most experienced and highly regarded editors, with assistance from the managing editor.

Yehyun Kim

Yehyun Kim is a photojournalist for The Connecticut Mirror capturing the full breadth of experience in the Constitution State. Kim has had internships with the Victoria Advocate, USA Today and Acadia National Park. She has a journalism degree from the University of Missouri/Columbia. Kim was born and raised in South Korea and studied photojournalism at the Danish School of Media and Journalism. She participated in the Eddie Adams Workshop and has a degree from Dongduk Women’s University in South Korea. She won the 74th College Photographer Of The Year Award of Excellence in General News.