2023-2024

Aubrey Wright

Aubrey Wright is a multimedia journalist covering equity in higher education for WFIU/WTIU Indiana Public Media in Bloomington, Indiana. Prior to joining WFIU/WTIU, she worked alongside The Columbus Dispatch’s metro desk as a full-time intern and freelanced for The Columbus Jewish News. She produced a multimedia enterprise project on the rise of gunfire into family homes in Columbus and served in The Columbus Dispatch’s award-winning Mobile Newsroom while covering education, health, crime and business. She is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University, where she earned a B.A. in journalism and served as managing editor for content at The Lantern, the student newspaper. As managing editor, she covered Ohio State’s biggest issues, including police violence and its presence on campus, multiple criminal trials and a decades-long sexual abuse scandal.

Hannah Gross

Hannah Gross covers education and child welfare in New Jersey for NJ Spotlight News, a nonprofit news organization. Previously, Gross reported for NBC10 Philadelphia and Telemundo 62, where she covered gun violence prevention efforts in Philadelphia, a chemical spill in the Delaware River and other local issues in English and Spanish. She has also held education reporting internships at the National Education Association and Forbes. Gross graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Hispanic Studies. She spent most of her college career reporting for NBC10 Philadelphia, Telemundo 62 and her school newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian. Gross hails from South Orange, NJ where she got her start as a journalist working for The Columbian, the student-run newspaper at Columbia High School in Maplewood. There, she reported on school segregation, mental health and student drug use. Gross is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She enjoys baking, reading and making jewelry.

Maia Bond

Maia Bond covers poverty and healthcare in Dubuque, Iowa for the Telegraph-Herald. In college, Bond covered breaking news and the Missouri statehouse as an intern for the Kansas City Star. She also previously covered local government, housing and elections for the Columbia Missourian. She holds a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and won a White House Correspondents' Association scholarship in 2022 for government reporting.

Brooklyn Draisey

Brooklyn Draisey covers higher education across Iowa for Iowa Capital Dispatch. Prior to joining the Iowa Capital Dispatch team, Draisey reported stories from the Quad-Cities, covering the region’s arts and culture community and connecting individual perspectives to larger issues influencing everyone. She fell in love with journalism at a young age, watching national news and reading local publications with her family, and has pursued her career in the industry since joining her high school newspaper. She worked as a reporter and editor at The Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa’s student-run newspaper, and reported on Eastern Iowa for The Gazette and The Southeast Iowa Union before graduating in 2021. Draisey holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Mass Communication and certificate in Entrepreneurial Management from the University of Iowa.

Jordan Green

Jordan Green covers the rural beat for the Longview News-Journal in Longview, Texas. He interned at The Saturday Evening Post magazine in 2022, writing about Midwest culture. He interned in 2020 and 2021 at The Oklahoman in Oklahoma City, where he covered general news, breaking news and the coronavirus pandemic, among other topics. He began his journalism career as a high school sophomore in 2017 at his hometown weekly newspaper, The Blackwell (Okla.) Journal-Tribune. He graduated from Northwestern Oklahoma State University in 2023, where he served as editor-in-chief of the campus paper.

My Ly

My Ly covers the health disparities in Little Rock, Arkansas, for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Before joining the newsroom, Ly was a student at Auburn University where she served as a managing editor, community reporter and editor for The Auburn Plainsman, the student-run newspaper. While at Auburn she earned her bachelor's degree in journalism.

Caleb W. Barber

Caleb Barber covers rural issues and the state legislature in Mitchell, South Dakota for the Mitchell Republic/Forum News Service. Barber was an associate editor and reporter at the Daily Emerald, the University of Oregon's flagship independent student newspaper, where he covered issues pertaining to the city of Eugene, Lane County and the UO at large. Barber interned at the Eugene Weekly, where he covered city government of Eugene, Board of Education elections for Lane Community College. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Journalism from the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication with minors in English and Legal Studies.

Jordan Rusche

Jordan Rusche covers community news in rural North Dakota for the Tioga Tribune and The Journal in Crosby. She recently graduated from South Dakota State University in Brookings where she served as co-editor-in-chief of The Collegian, the student newspaper, and received a bachelor's in English and journalism. Rusche also has held internships at South Dakota Public Broadcasting, doing general reporting on stories throughout the state, and 605 Magazine, covering South Dakota arts, entertainment and more. She was part of the 2022 Pulitzer Center Campus Consortium Fellowship reporting on Indigenous representation in education.

Nikolai Mather

Nikolai Mather covers rural communities for WHQR in Wilmington, North Carolina. Previously, he reported on religion for the Athens-Banner Herald in Athens, Georgia and social justice for Queen City Nerve in Charlotte, North Carolina. Mather was a Levine Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science and served as the opinion editor of the student paper. He primarily studied genocide, winning a scholarship to study the Holocaust in Berlin with Humanity in Action. He has worked in Norway, France and the United Kingdom, but calls the South home.

Carlos Nogueras

Carlos Nogueras reports on the vast Permian Basin region in West Texas for the Texas Tribune, writing about the hundreds of thousands of people who shoulder the impacts of an extraction-based economy in the oil and gas capital of the country. Before relocating to Texas, Nogueras was a political reporting fellow for Al Día News in Philadelphia, a bilingual digital paper and magazine covering Latino politics, its dynamics, power players and the policy shaping the Hispanic community. Nogueras has written extensively about Latino lawmakers—their stances versus their words, promises on the campaign trail and how they helped define municipal local politics. In Puerto Rico, where Nogueras was born and raised, he was a freelancer writing about the unpaid labor behind motherhood during the pandemic, gun violence and the waning coffee industry. He earned his bachelor's degree in music from Berklee College of Music in Boston and began his master's degree in journalism at the University of Puerto Rico.