WRITING

Cheyanne Daniels

Cheyanne M. Daniels reports for the Chicago Sun-Times, covering the city's South and West Side neighborhoods. She hails from the south suburbs of Chicago, and earned her master's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 2021, specializing in politics, policy and foreign affairs reporting. As a grad student, Daniels reported on politics and policies affecting disenfranchised and minority communities, such as Illinois inmates' and their response to the pandemic and vaccines. Daniels' work has been published in the Wisconsin State Journal, the Grio, South Side Weekly, and by UPI. Previously, she was a research scholar for the Journalism, Ethics and Democracy Institute at Notre Dame. Daniels holds a bachelor's in journalism from Illinois' North Central College, where she served as news editor of The Chronicle and NCClinked, its online news site.

Jasmine Demers

Jasmine Demers reports on issues related to youth, social services and legislative accountability for the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit newsroom based in Louisville. Previously, she worked for the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, her hometown, covering science, health, government and the pandemic. Following months of local coronavirus coverage, including deaths in Arizona nursing homes, Demers received top awards from the Arizona Newspapers Association. The Arizona Press Club has honored her science reporting. She holds a master's degree from The University of Arizona School of Journalism, where she was editor-in-chief of the student-run Daily Wildcat, and received the Philip Mangelsdorf Award for Outstanding Newsperson of the Year as well as the Douglas D. Martin Award for Courage and Integrity.

Marie Fazio

Marie Fazio reports on St. Tammany Parish for The Times-Picayune and The Advocate, a news organization based in New Orleans. Previously, she was a reporting fellow at The New York Times, covering breaking news and general assignment reporting. Fazio has written crime and feature stories and breaking news for the Chicago Tribune, and her series highlighting disability issues in Illinois earned her an award from the Chicago Headline Club for best investigative/public service reporting. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Fazio worked at the student paper, The Observer, and has also reported at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Florida Times-Union, in her hometown of Jacksonville. She is an avid runner and enjoys the simpler things in life, like sunrises, hot coffee and paper maps.

Robert Finn

Robert James Finn covers Louisiana's Florida Parishes for The Advocate in Baton Rouge. As an intern for VTDigger, a nonprofit website covering daily news in Vermont, he reported on COVID-19's effects on the state economy and legislature. Finn has covered healthcare inequity in Mississippi for a series partnership between the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and the Pulitzer Center, and his work has appeared in the Clarion-Ledger, the Hattiesburg American, MLK50, and Indian Country Today. As a student at Middlebury College, he worked in Guatemala on an initiative to revitalize Mayan languages spoken in the country's highlands, played basketball, and was managing editor of the student newspaper, The Middlebury Campus, where he helped direct the publication's transition to digital platforms as students were sent home in the first weeks of the pandemic. Finn graduated in February 2021 with a degree in history and Spanish. He's from Mill Valley, California.

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.

Andrew Howard

Andrew Howard covers the statehouse for The Maine Monitor in Augusta. He is a graduate of Arizona State University, where he reported on state government as an intern at The Arizona Republic and the Arizona Capitol Times. Howard also served as editor-in-chief of The State Press, the student-run newspaper at ASU. He is the recipient of the Associated Collegiate Press 2019 Story of the Year Award for breaking news and the Arizona Press Club's student-news award for his scoop that Kurt Volker, then U.S. special envoy to Ukraine, had resigned from the Trump State Department. For his honors thesis, Howard studied journalism's role in America's polarization and how a nonprofit business model may decrease media polarization. He grew up in Phoenix.

Claire Potter

Claire Potter reports on environmental issues for the Valley News in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. Previously, she was a research intern for the “The Axe Files,” David Axelrod's podcast on CNN's site. Potter graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor's degree in American History and English Literature from The University of Chicago in 2021, where she was a managing editor and contributor to Expositions, the student-run magazine covering environmental issues. Potter has written about Illinois' child welfare and juvenile justice systems for the student paper, The Chicago Maroon, and reported on the Iowa caucuses for ABC's political news site during the summer of 2019. A Pulitzer Center fellow, Potter has reported on the activists and urban planners who are reintroducing wetlands and rivers into Mexico City. She grew up in Warwick, New York.

Jayna Omaye

Jayna Omaye covers ethnic and cultural affairs for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Hawaii's largest daily newspaper. Born and raised on Oahu, Omaye recently worked as a staff writer at Honolulu Magazine, where she led one of its largest projects in recent years—a 19-page cover story and 20 individual pages online—about the life stories of Hawaii's Japanese-American veterans. The multimedia feature won two national first-place awards. Her work has also garnered three local awards. Omaye began her journalism career as a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel in Florida, and then moved back home to work at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in 2015. She earned her master's degree from Northwestern University, and her bachelor's from the University of Oregon. Omaye has danced hula for most of her life and recently began playing taiko, a percussion instrument, after a story on Honolulu's ethnic festivals inspired her to reconnect with her Japanese heritage.

Marisa Mecke

Marisa Mecke reports on environmental issues in western North Carolina for the Mountain Times, a newspaper based in Boone, North Carolina and also serving nearby counties. A 2021 graduate of Davidson College, Mecke was a feature writer for The Davidsonian, the student paper, and an intern for WDAV, a classical music public radio station, where she produced a video series of interviews with station volunteers and contributed to WDAV’s blog, “Of Note.” She was also the programming director of the student radio station, WALT. Davidson College awarded Mecke the Latin American Studies Prize in 2021 for “her groundbreaking study highlighting the often-silenced transnational relationships between Cubans on the island and in the United States since the 1959 Revolution.” Home for Mecke is Atlanta, Georgia.

Rose Varela

Rose Monique Varela Henriquez reports for El Nuevo Herald in Miami, focusing on the Spanish-speaking immigrant communities of South Florida. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Varela Henriquez is a bilingual multimedia journalist with experience covering social justice issues and economic disparities. She interned at the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo in Puerto Rico, where her in-depth investigation uncovered how the island’s government halted a plan meant to assist homeless people during the pandemic. She also created data visualizations and carried out fact-checks on Puerto Rico’s governor candidate for the 2020 election. While working for Pulso Estudiantil, a student-run news site at the University of Puerto Rico, Varela Henriquez developed her photojournalism skills, and she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, magna cum laude, in 2020.