WRITING

Acacia Coronado

Acacia Coronado covers the Texas Legislature and the politics of climate change for The Associated Press. She is a recent graduate from the University of Texas at Austin. Her passion for storytelling led her to a bachelor of journalism degree. Most recently, she covered immigration and human rights as a fellow at The Texas Observer. She also did two semesters at The Texas Tribune as an investigative fellow, covering immigration, the Texas Legislature and criminal justice, and a summer in New York at The Wall Street Journal as a reporting intern with the U.S. News East Coast Bureau. She first fell in love with journalism as a Life and Arts reporter with The Daily Texan, the student newspaper, in 2016. She loves returning to her small-town roots and living her Catholic faith to the fullest.

H.L. Comeriato

H.L. Comeriato reports for The Devil Strip, a community-owned, independent news outlet in Akron, Ohio. Comeriato covers health care in the region in its broadest sense from gun violence to immigrants navigating the Medicaid system. Comeriato is a writer, editor and multimedia journalist living and working in Akron, Ohio. Their work includes contributing to TransAkron, a visual storytelling project and comprehensive, educational resource designed to explore the lived realities of trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people living in the Rustbelt. Comeriato is a graduate of the University of Akron Williams Honors College and has interned with the Akron Community Foundation. Currently, they serve on the Board of Directors for the Community AIDS Network/Akron Pride Initiative. Their work has appeared both in print and online.

Sara Cline

Sara Cline reports for The Associated Press, covering the Oregon Legislature and state government, with a special focus on the tech boom and the crisis in housing affordability. Cline covered City Hall and homelessness at the San Antonio Express-News through the Hearst Fellowship Program. During her first year in the program, she covered breaking news and crime for the Times Union in Albany, New York. There, she also had a column. Prior to the fellowship, Cline worked at the Brockton Enterprise and Taunton Daily Gazette, both in Massachusetts, as a general assignment reporter. She has also contributed to newspapers and magazines in Arizona, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. She has won New England Newspaper & Press Association awards in the Sports Column and Racial and Ethnic Issues categories. Cline graduated from the University of Arizona with a B.A. in journalism. During her time at university, she also studied anthropology and participated in an archaeological dig in Italy.

Brittany Callan

Brittany Callan reports for The Beacon, a nonprofit, digital news organization in Kansas City, Missouri, where she focuses on health and the environment and the connections between the two. Before joining Report for America, Callan was a communications associate at the Medical College of Wisconsin and a freelance fact-checker for Discover Magazine. She has reported on a labor union movement in the service industry for Milwaukee Magazine and research in bioprosthetic ovaries for Northwestern Research News. She graduated with an M.S. in Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2018, where she specialized in health, environment and science. She holds a B.S. in biomedical engineering from the Milwaukee School of Engineering in 2015.

PrincessSafiya Byers

PrincessSafiya Byers is a reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service which focuses on low-income minority residents of the Wisconsin city. Her wide-ranging beat covers health, minority businesses, faith, jobs, housing and transportation. A proud Milwaukee native, Byers is a 2020 graduate of Marquette University, the Catholic university in Milwaukee. She has had internships with the Milwaukee Community Journal, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service itself. Byers has also co-produced a community podcast and written for community newsletters. In 2018, she was awarded the Bucks Youth Leader award for community service and leadership. In addition to her journalism, Byers has been working for the non-profit children and family center, COA Youth and Families Center, which began in 1906 as the Children’s Outing Association.

Michael Butler

Michael Butler reports for Technical.ly, where he covers winners and losers in the tech economy in Philadelphia. He moved to Philadelphia in 2010 to participate in the AmeriCorps program CityYear and later covered the arts during an internship with the Philadelphia Weekly and attended Temple University, where he graduated in 2016. He grew up in Augusta, Georgia, as part of a military family and moved around several times over the course of his life. As a freelance journalist, he has contributed to platforms like National Public Radio affiliate WHYY and reported on culture and the arts for publications like Okayplayer and Remezcla. In 2018, he was nominated for the Freelance Reporter of the Year award by Philadelphia’s Pen & Pencil Club. In 2019, he was one of the recipients of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism’s inaugural Next Generation Award grant. Later that year, he was selected by the Maynard Institute for Journalism to be a Maynard 200 fellow.

Kailey Broussard

Kailey Broussard is an accountability reporter covering Arlington, Texas for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. With a population of almost 400,000 people, Arlington is among the nation’s largest cities with no daily professional news presence. While pursuing her journalism degree at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, she reported on Arizona’s congressional delegation in Washington D.C., pedestrian fatalities in the Sun Belt, and Venezuelan refugees in Peru as well as U.S. disaster response through a 2019 Carnegie-Knight News21 reporting fellowship. She holds an MMC from Arizona State University and a B.A. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Originally from Louisiana, Broussard spent two years interning and freelancing for The Advocate in Baton Rouge and four years as a staff writer and editor for her student paper, The Vermilion. Her work has won recognition from the Society of Professional Journalists regions 11 and 12, Southeast Journalism Conference, Arizona Press Club, and Broadcast Education Association.

Jackie Botts

Jackie is a data and multimedia reporter originally from Southern California. She has interned on the Data and Enterprise desk for Reuters News and for her hometown paper, The Santa Barbara Independent. Her reporting on immigration, the environment, and wildfires has appeared in Pacific Standard, SFGate, Public Radio International’s “The World,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Peninsula Press and the Half Moon Bay Review. A graduate of Stanford University’s master’s program in journalism, she received the James S. Robinson student journalism award for a multimedia series that documented the impacts of wildfires on immigrant communities in Northern California in 2017. The California legislature’s treatment of poverty issues Jackie covers poverty with a legislative and data focus as part of “The California Divide.” Poverty is the biggest coverage gap in the state. In response to this, CALmatters, McClatchy’s five California news organizations and the 25 Digital First newsrooms have created a news hub with a collaboration project on the topic. “The California Divide” is an unprecedented news partnership that combines the strengths of respected news-gathering organizations across the state. The shared goal is to build a sustainable and replicable model for data-driven, change-making journalism in this critically underserved coverage area. Report for America has teamed up with three of the new hub’s newsrooms to offer three new corps member placements: CALmatters in Sacramento, The Fresno Bee in Fresno and The Mercury News in San Jose.

Samuel Bojarski

Sam Bojarski covers Brooklyn, N.Y. for The Haitian Times. The new Report for America position allows him to continue working for the paper, but as a staffer. Bojarski has covered Haiti and its diaspora for the Haitian Times as a freelancer since the fall of 2018. Along with the Haitian Times staff, his work on the reporting project “Dashed Dreams: Haiti Since the 2010 Quake,” received grant funding from the Pulitzer Center. As a freelance journalist, Bojarski has covered local news in western Pennsylvania for more than two years, on behalf of Trib Total Media, BeaverCountian.com, PublicSource and other outlets in the Keystone State. He also covered the North American maritime industry for multiple trade publications. In December of 2015, he graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, where he contributed to the student newspaper, The Pitt News, and interned for Pitt Magazine, the university’s alumni publication.

Brandon Block

Brandon Block reports for The Olympian in Olympia, Washington, focusing on homelessness in and around the state capital and the factors that contribute to homelessness, such as mental illness and drug addiction. Block is a reporter and filmmaker who, for two years, has covered criminal justice, immigration and the environment in Baltimore. His writing has appeared in WYPR 88.1, the DCist, and the Baltimore Beat, and he fact-checked the book “I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad.” He spent the last year in Bangkok, Thailand, where he worked for an education nonprofit on a Princeton in Asia fellowship. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and Film & Media Studies from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Block got his start in journalism by writing film and theater criticism for Baltimore City Paper.