2022-2023

Phoebe Taylor-Vuolo

Phoebe Taylor-Vuolo reports for WSKG, an NPR affiliate in Binghamton, New York, covering rural health care in the southern part of the state. She grew up in Brooklyn and is a fourth generation Brooklynite. Before joining WSKG, Taylor-Vuolo freelanced for Documented, a nonprofit news site that focuses on New York City’s immigrant communities and policies that affect them. She reported on the city’s immigration court system and explored immigration issues and conditions in detention centers and county jails. Taylor-Vuolo holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and creative writing from Baruch College, where she investigated the use of video teleconferencing in immigration court hearings in a piece that was published by Gothamist, a website. She currently lives in Delaware County, New York and when she’s not writing and reporting she’s painting houses, growing vegetables, and taking care of her chickens.

Victoria Rossi

Victoria Rossi covers the status of women in El Paso, Texas for El Paso Matters, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Previously, she worked as a research fellow for a UCLA School of Law data project, where she investigated state prisons thought to be undercounting COVID-19 deaths. Rossi spent the summer of 2019 in El Paso documenting conditions among asylum seekers returned to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico under the U.S. government’s Migrant Protection Protocols. Originally from Houston, Rossi has covered education and health at the Napa Valley Register, earning her two awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association, and has reported in Latin America and South Asia. She holds a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a master’s in public policy from The University of Texas at Austin.

Celia Hack

Celia Hack reports on local government for The Wichita Beacon, a nonprofit news site in Wichita, Kansas. Prior to this, she interned for EcoRI News in Providence, Rhode Island, covering local government and environmental issues. Hack earned a bachelor’s degree from Brown University in 2021, where she worked as a reporter and section editor for The Brown Daily Herald. Her outstanding accomplishments earned her a second place award from the university honoring excellence in journalism. Hack is from Westwood, Kansas and has covered local government, criminal justice and education as a freelancer for the Shawnee Mission Post and for The Journal, a publication of the Kansas Leadership Center, a nonprofit in Wichita. As a research assistant, Hack has worked for Global Energy Monitor, a nonprofit collecting data on worldwide fossil fuel projects, and for the Climate and Development Lab, a think tank researching climate policy and politics.

Katie Hyson

Katie Hyson reports on racial justice for WUFT News, a public media newsroom in Gainesville, Florida. Before her Report for America position, Hyson worked as a supervising editor of digital content for WUFT. In 2020, she graduated from the professional master's program in mass communications at the University of Florida. Hyson focused on audio, visual and written narratives, resulting in her report on the first openly transgender person to run for the Florida Senate, and a story that focused on one woman in the months leading up to the closure of her homeless camp. Hyson, of Lutz, Florida, is obsessed with the powerful overlap of creative storytelling, rigorous journalism and multimedia. To that end, she developed and launched a two-course practicum in digital production and taught multimedia reporting at the University of Florida. When there's not a global pandemic, you can catch her telling stories onstage.

Rebecca Griesbach

Rebecca Griesbach covers the educational opportunity gap in Birmingham, Alabama, for AL.com, which reports on Alabama news. Prior to joining AL, Griesbach tracked and reported on COVID-19 cases in correctional facilities for The New York Times, and gathered election data for OpenElections.net. Her journalism career started when she joined her high school newspaper as a hopeful comics artist in the 10th grade. There, she worked with ProPublica journalists to tell the story of school segregation in her hometown of Tuscaloosa. As a college intern for Chalkbeat, Griesbach covered education history, equity and access across Alabama and in Memphis. She holds a master's degree in gender and race studies from The University of Alabama, where she earned her bachelor's in journalism and was editor-in-chief of The Crimson White, the student newspaper.

Vicki Adame

Vicki Adame is a bilingual reporter covering Minnesota’s Latino communities for Minnesota Public Radio, which is based in St. Paul. An award-winning multimedia journalist, Adame has focused on the lives of immigrants and communities of color, especially Latino communities in California and Washington state. Most recently, her work has appeared in Palabra, Latino Rebels, Latino USA, CTLatinoNews, among others, and she has translated articles for El Salvador’s El Faro. Adame holds a master’s degree from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Her reporting on communities of color in the Tri-Cities area of Washington state earned her two consecutive C.B. Blethen Memorial Awards for Distinguished Coverage of Diversity. Her hometown is Merced, California.

Charlie McGee

Charlie McGee reports on local government accountability and environmental issues for the Desert Dispatch in Barstow, California. Previously, McGee's investigative work has detailed Hurricane Florence's aftermath in an impoverished coastal town, for VICE; and sparked a criminal investigation by uncovering an illegal PAC in North Carolina for The Daily Tar Heel, the student paper of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Indy Week. McGee has written for Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal, and his investigative work on corporate titans in the coronavirus era is a soon-to-come book. He won multiple awards as a reporter at The Daily Tar Heel, including second place in the Associated Collegiate Press's 2020 Reporter of the Year competition for a series that prompted a judge to reverse a $2.5 million deal between UNC-Chapel Hill and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He grew up in Huntersville, North Carolina.

Katrina Pross

Katrina Pross covers criminal justice for WFYI Public Media, Indiana's chief PBS and NPR member station, based in Indianapolis. Pross grew up in Eagan, Minnesota and has reported on the courts and criminal justice for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, including the trial of Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd—she was one of the select pool reporters rotating inside the courtroom. Pross has also reported on criminal justice reform and COVID-19 outbreaks in Minnesota prisons. She double majored in journalism and French at the University of Minnesota, where she was a reporter and editor at the school's paper, The Minnesota Daily. Pross has interned at APM Reports, the Star Tribune, and a radio station in France during a study-abroad program. She graduated in 2020, and was named the Daily's Editor of the Year.

Becca Savransky

Becca Savransky is an education reporter for the Idaho Statesman in Boise, Idaho. Before joining the Statesman, Savransky was a reporter for SeattlePI, the website of the former Seattle Post-Intelligencer paper, where she wrote about the surge of COVID-19 cases and the pandemic's impact on the Seattle community. Savransky has also covered homelessness and housing in Seattle, reporting stories about the lack of affordable housing in the region and the barriers people faced in finding permanent housing. She has worked as a reporter and social media curator at The Hill in Washington, D.C., and was managing editor and summer editor-in-chief at The Daily Northwestern, the student paper at Northwestern University. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and political science. She's from Stamford, Connecticut.

Brandon Drenon

Brandon Drenon is a Social Justice and Equity reporter at the IndyStar in Indianapolis, Indiana, covering the black and brown communities of the greater metro Indy area. Prior to Brandon’s arrival in Indiana, he was a video producer for BBC Reel, a digitally native platform of the British Broadcasting Corporation, where he reported on health and wellness topics as well as Black culture. Brandon also worked as a production assistant on the documentary Whose Vote Counts, a PBS Frontline production, which was recently nominated for a Peabody Award. In 2020, Brandon received his master’s in journalism from Columbia University to build upon his writing career as a freelance contributor for the Huffington Post and New York Post.