South

Caity Coyne

Caity Coyne was the editor-in-chief of West Virginia University’s award-winning, independent student newspaper, The Daily Athanaeum, and a reporting intern at the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Coyne is originally from San Diego, CA, but she found a home in West Virginia as a student. As a RFA corps member and Galloway Fellow, Caity reports on the state’s southern coalfields for the Charleston Gazette-Mail. She has tenaciously covered a statewide teachers’ strike and featured a once-booming coal town that may be forced to dissolve as a municipality.  More Caity

Wyatt Massey

Wyatt has covered religion, immigration and social services for the Frederick News-Post in Maryland. There and as a freelance writer, he has covered stories ranging from childhood malnutrition in Haiti to gentrification in Brooklyn to faith in rural Kansas to heroin and opioid addiction in Milwaukee. Massey was an O’Hare Fellow at America, a respected national Catholic magazine. As an intern at The Baltimore Sun, he covered crime, along with researching for and helping craft Justin George’s yearlong “Shoot to Kill” investigation of US gun homicide trends. Wyatt grew up on a family farm in Hollandale, Wisconsin and majored in English at Marquette University.

Will Wright

Will Wright covered the environment and government accountability during internships at the Sacramento Bee, the Lexington Herald-Leader and the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. He was editor-in-chief of University of Kentucky’s independent student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel. After graduating from University of Kentucky in December 2016, Wright completed a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. He grew up in Eighty Four, PA, a small town outside Pittsburgh. Since joining RFA as a Galloway Fellow, Will has been awarded the McClatchy President’s Award for Journalism Excellence and a First Place Kentucky Press Association Award for his ongoing coverage of water in Eastern Kentucky and holding public agencies accountable. Watchdog reporting in Eastern Kentucky Wright has reopened the Lexington Herald Leader’s Pike County Bureau in Kentucky. He already put a spotlight on Kentucky’s “worst water district” where some residents went without water for weeks. The district’s business manager retired shortly after publication, and the state committed $3.4 million to fix water issues in eastern Kentucky. Will also collaborated with veteran reporter Bill Estep to break a story about $3 million in back taxes owed by Kentucky-based coal companies linked to West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice. Will continues this work in his second year as a Report for America corps member.

Shirley L. Smith

Shirley L. Smith is an investigative journalist with experience covering topics ranging from the HIV/AIDS epidemic and other health care issues to criminal justice, natural disasters, education, municipal government and a myriad of social issues.  She is one of 61 reporters who was selected to cover under-covered communities and issues across the country as part of the Report for America program, a national public service program dedicated to local journalism. Prior to joining MCIR, Shirley worked as a freelance writer for several years.  She also worked as a full-time reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Virgin Islands Daily News, The Telegraph and The South Fulton Neighbor.  Her work has also been featured in numerous other publications and news sites including The Clarion-Ledger, Mississippi Today, The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, HealthQuest magazine, Spinal Column magazine, Women’s eNews and MedHelp.org. She has also taught journalism at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California. Shirley earned her master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She also had a stint as a gubernatorial speechwriter, and as a public relations executive and consultant.

Samantha Max

Samantha Max was an investigative reporting intern for the Medill Justice Project and a bilingual multimedia news intern at Hoy, Chicago Tribune’s Spanish-language daily. She returned to her hometown of Baltimore in 2015 and again in 2016 to work as a newsroom intern for NPR-affiliate WYPR. She has written on immigration and the criminal justice system. Samantha spent her first year with Report for America at The Telegraph in Macon, Georgia, where she covered health and inequity in central Georgia. For her second year as a corps member, she’ll cover the criminal justice system for Nashville Public Radio.  

Rafael René Díaz Torres

Rafael has been a freelance journalist and geography professor at the University of Puerto Rico, where he specializes in the intersection of local sports, media and society. He has worked as a news and sports reporter for The Puerto Rico Daily Sun, NotiCel.com, 80 Grados and Diálogo UPR. In 2018, he joined the team of Todas PR, a feminist newspaper founded by Puerto Rican female journalists. He received his B.A. from University of Puerto Rico and two masters degrees in geography, mass media and women’s studies at Penn State, where he was president of the Puerto Rican Graduate Student Association. He is currently ABD in History and Caribbean Studies at the Center of Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. He is the editor of a multidisciplinary academic journal at the University of Puerto Rico.

Michelle Liu

Michelle was a reporting intern for the Toledo Blade, and a general assignment intern for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. As a reporter for the Yale Daily News and a contributing reporter for the New Haven Independent, she shadowed canvassers in New Hampshire and covered labor unions in Connecticut. She was also a program coordinator for Yale’s Summer Journalism Program for high school students. Since joining Report for America, Liu has covered criminal justice for Mississippi Today. The Institute for Non-Profit News named Michelle’s reporting on the spike of prison deaths in Mississippi as one of the “Best in Nonprofit News” in 2018. Her continued reporting on this and other stories not only helped lead the MDOC to invite the FBI to get involved in the investigation of these deaths, but her dogged records requests were cited by the Department of Corrections while asking the Legislature to exempt agencies from parts of the Public Records Act. More recently, the Mississippi Humanities Council invited Michelle to moderate a panel titled, “Locked Up: Criminal Justice in Mississippi.” She continues this work in her second year with Report for America.

Mallory Falk

Mallory is a two-time Edward R. Murrow Regional Award-winner, a 2016 USC Annenberg National Health Reporting Fellow, and a radio journalist whose stories have aired on All Things Considered, Here & Now, and Texas Standard. She was an education reporter for New Orleans’ NPR-affiliate WWNO and a producer of What My Students Taught Me, an education podcast from The Atlantic and Columbia Journalism School’s Teacher Project. Earlier she served as communications director for Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools. Originally from Pittsburgh, Falk is a graduate of Middlebury College and the Transom Story Workshop.In her first year with Report for America, Mallory was a multimedia reporter for KRWG in New Mexico, covering education, healthcare, economic development and sustainability. In her second year, she will join Texas News Hub, based at KERA, to cover the borderlands and El Paso.

Lauren Lindstrom

Lauren has been a reporter at The Blade in Toledo for nearly five years, most recently on the health beat covering everything from Ohio’s heroin and opioid epidemic to Toledo’s efforts to reduce childhood lead poisoning. Her work has won several state and local awards for investigation and breaking news, including the Press Club of Toledo’s 2017 Touchstone Award for a series examining the lack of local oversight on homes with unsafe lead levels. Originally from Wisconsin, she interned at the Green Bay Press Gazette and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Lauren majored in journalism with a minor in Spanish at Northwestern University, where she was news editor for North by Northwestern, an independent student magazine.

Eric Shelton

Eric Shelton is a photojournalist whose work has been published in the Boston Globe, LA Times, New York Times, USA Today, and Washington Post. He first left his home state of Mississippi to intern with the Associated Press in Boston. He worked across Texas and Mississippi as a photojournalist for Texarkana Gazette and the Natchez Democrat, a multimedia journalist for the Abilene Reporter-News, and digital reporter and chief photographer for the Hattiesburg American. He then worked as photo editor of the Killeen Daily Herald, managing photo and video for five publications. Eric has won awards from the Mississippi Associated Press Managing Editors and the Arkansas Press Photographers Association. He returned to Mississippi to become the first photojournalist at Mississippi Today. He continues with us for a second year.