2021-2022

Kayla Canne

Kayla Canne reports on poverty and the low-income housing shortage for the Asbury Park Press in Neptune, New Jersey. As a freelancer, Canne wrote for her hometown daily newspaper, the Democrat & Chronicle in Rochester, New York, and for The Sun Chronicle, a publication in Attleboro, Massachusetts. She is a proud CODA (child of deaf adults) and was a deaf education volunteer with the Peace Corps in Ghana for nearly two years until the pandemic forced her evacuation in March 2020. Prior to that, she was the lead enterprise reporter and assignment editor at The Sun Chronicle in Attleboro, where she cultivated a passion for narrative, human-first storytelling, and helped editors launch a new weekend edition as they shifted to a six-day paper. Canne's work earned her two awards from the New England Newspaper & Press Association. She is a journalism graduate of Boston University's College of Communication.

Melissa Montalvo

Melissa Montalvo covers childhood poverty in California's Central Valley for The Fresno Bee. Before this, Montalvo, a bilingual reporter, covered the food and agriculture industries, Indigenous issues, and Mexican American culture as a freelancer, with bylines in Civil Eats, L.A. Taco, and more. Montalvo was born in Southern California, raised in the Arizona desert, and identifies as a daughter of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. She graduated from the University of Southern California with a B.A. in international relations, minors in business law and French, and Renaissance scholar and Global scholar distinctions. In 2015, she won a Fulbright Award to serve as an English teaching assistant at Mexico's Universidad Tecnologica de Jalisco in Guadalajara, Jalisco. Montalvo is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Shaena Montanari

Shaena Montanari reports on health disparities in Arizona's rural communities for the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization. A scientist-turned-journalist, Montanari has been a freelancer since 2017, reporting on science and health. Her work has appeared in Popular Science, National Geographic, among others. She earned her Ph.D. in comparative biology from the Richard Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History in 2012. But after an AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Mass Media fellowship at National Geographic, Montanari switched from a career in paleontology to journalism. In addition to her freelance work, she was a Pulliam fellow at The Arizona Republic, and holds a master's degree in investigative journalism from Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Her hometown is Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Charlie Wolfson

Charlie Wolfson is a local government accountability reporter at PublicSource, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to public service reporting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, his hometown. Wolfson focuses on policy, the impact of government programs and election procedure and access. For three years he reported for The Boston Globe, both while earning his bachelor’s degree in journalism at Northeastern University and after he graduated in 2020. Wolfson was a reporter and editor at The Huntington News, Northeastern’s student paper, including a term as editor-in-chief and an intense several months covering the university’s response to the early days of the pandemic. In early 2021 he interned at the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University.

Alixel Cabrera

Alixel Cabrera covers government accountability in West Valley City for The Salt Lake Tribune, a nonprofit newspaper in Salt Lake City, Utah. Cabrera is a Venezuelan journalist who has reported on the economy, energy, food and culture for newspapers and websites in Venezuela and the U.S., including The Salt Lake Tribune and Rest of World, an international nonprofit journalism organization. She has also reported for La Verdad and Cronica Uno, where she covered Maracaibo, her hometown and one of the cities most affected by blackouts and food shortages in Venezuela. Cabrera earned her master's degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2020. She was a Maria Moors Cabot scholar and the recipient of a Jack R. Howard fellowship in international journalism.

Caroline Eggers

Caroline Eggers covers environmental issues with a focus on equity for WPLN, an NPR member station in Nashville, Tennessee. Before this, she spent several years covering water quality issues, biodiversity, climate change and Mammoth Cave National Park for newsrooms in the South. Her reporting on homelessness and a runoff-related fish kill for the Bowling Green Daily News earned her awards from the Kentucky Press Association. Eggers studied journalism and creating writing at Emory University and began her science communication career in Washington, D.C. at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry and the American Wind Energy Association. Beyond deadlines, she is frequently dancing to electronic dance music, playing piano or photographing wildlife or her poodle, Princess. She's from Owensboro, Kentucky.

Gracyn Doctor

Gracyn Doctor covers race and equity for WFAE, an NPR member station in Charlotte, North Carolina. She earned her master's degree in arts journalism from Syracuse University in 2020, where she reported on health and policy change as an intern at WAER, the public radio station on campus. Doctor also wrote for The NewsHouse, a student-run news site, and Syracuse.com and hosted and produced a podcast on news and Black culture. For her capstone project at American Theatre magazine, she reported on the state of theatre at the height of the pandemic, focusing on the pandemic's effect on theatre companies of color. Originally from Charleston, South Carolina, Doctor says her goal is to create equal and better coverage of the Black and LGBTQIA communities, and to be an honest, trustworthy voice in the media.

Kayla Renie

Kayla Renie is a photojournalist covering communities of color for the Athens Banner-Herald in Athens, Georgia. Previously, she was a photographer for the Jackson Hole News & Guide in Jackson, Wyoming. Born and raised in the Southeast, Renie was photo editor of The Red & Black, the student-run website and weekly paper at the University of Georgia. Her internships have taken her to Texas and Indiana, where she depicted childhood in rural communities and the pandemic's initial effect on a county. As an intern for The Muskegon Chronicle in Michigan, she built relationships within the community that enabled her to pursue more in-depth projects, spurring an interest in documenting family and gender dynamics and women's health issues. Renie's goal is to use the documenting of everyday moments as a way to help people to better understand what's going on in their communities and with each other.

Mirtha Donastorg

Mirtha Donastorg covers innovation and start-up initiatives at historically Black colleges and universities for The Plug, a news site based in Atlanta and devoted to Black tech trends, investigative stories and breaking news. She is a journalist with experience in TV, digital and radio, and was most recently an associate producer at CNN Digital where she helped curate multiple homepage platforms, as well as craft breaking news alerts viewed by millions daily. As a researcher for CNN, Donastorg fact-checked scripts from correspondents all over the globe and most notably, reported on the conviction of an abusive Catholic priest. Outside of work, she shares her love of soul music from around the world as a host of a weekly two-hour local radio show. Donastorg grew up in Auburn, Alabama. She’s a proud alumna of North Carolina State University, and is fluent in Spanish and French.

Shaun Robinson

Shaun Robinson covers northwest Vermont for VTDigger, a nonprofit daily news organization dedicated to watchdog reporting. Previously, Robinson worked as a statehouse correspondent for the Cape Cod Times, and produced coverage of Newton, Massachusetts for The Boston Globe. He has interned at GBH, Boston public radio, and did a six-month co-op at The Patriot Ledger, a daily paper in Quincy, Massachusetts, where he covered hundreds of stories, from a subway derailment to an 84-day sanitation workers' strike. When Robinson was editor-in-chief of The Daily Free Press, the student-run paper at Boston University, it won the 2019 New England College Newspaper of the Year Award. He earned a bachelor's degree in journalism, summa cum laude, in May 2021. Robinson was born in Seattle but grew up in central New Jersey. He's a lifelong soccer fan, and is steadily improving at solving The New York Times crossword puzzle.