WRITING

Brandon Lingle

Brandon Lingle, a recently retired Air Force officer, reports for the San Antonio Express-News, where he concentrates on political dysfunction in the city’s suburbs. As a military public affairs officer, he supported media around the world including multiple embeds in Iraq and Afghanistan. His work appears in various publications including The American Scholar, The New York Times (At War), Guernica, TIME and The Normal School. His writing has been nominated for a National Magazine Award and noted in The Best American Essays. He taught in the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Department of English and Fine Arts and is a contributing editor of War, Literature and the Arts. He’s won the Air Force Association’s Gill Robb Wilson Award for the humanities and the Air Force Academy’s Outstanding Educator of the Year. Lingle is also an Olmsted Grant Recipient.  A Lompoc, California native, Lingle earned a B.S. in history from the U.S. Air Force Academy, an M.A. in English from the University of Texas at San Antonio and an M.F.A. in nonfiction from Sierra Nevada College.

Isabelle Taft

Isabelle Taft covers Vietnamese and African-American communities for the Sun-Herald in Biloxi, Mississippi. Before joining Report for America, Taft worked as a researcher on Washington Post journalists’ book projects on Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle and President Trump’s impeachment. Before that, she worked in Hanoi, Vietnam, as a copy editor at Viet Nam News and a freelance journalist, reporting for publications including Politico Magazine and the Christian Science Monitor. She has also reported for The Texas Tribune. Taft was born and raised in Atlanta and majored in history at Yale University, where she graduated magna cum laude and co-edited a magazine of narrative nonfiction, The New Journal. Her reporting on women and reentry from prison in New Haven won the National Council on Crime & Delinquency Youth Media award.

Donte Kirby

Donte Kirby covers winners and losers in the tech economy for Technical.ly, a Baltimore-based news source publishing stories about the impact of the technology economy on growing cities and focusing on the entrepreneurs and technologists that make up that ecosystem. Kirby has spent the last year and a half as an education volunteer with the Peace Corps in Rwanda, where he taught English to over 150 students. Before that, as a journalist, he wrote for hyperlocal publications like JumpPhilly, the Philadelphia Citizen and Generocity covering arts, social impact, and community development. He had an earlier stint with Technical.ly as a contributing reporter. He holds a BA from Temple University in Philadelphia. “Break dancing saved my life,” says Kirby, who got into breakdancing his freshman year of high school after his mother died. He became interested in journalism after he became a Wallis Annenberg scholar.

Elizabeth Shwe

Elizabeth Shwe covers a range of health policy issues, including the status of asbestos victims, for Maryland Matters, a news nonprofit based in Takoma Park, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C., that focuses on politics and policy in the state. Shwe covered California state politics during her internship at The Sacramento Bee in 2019. She graduated from Princeton University with a political science degree in June 2020. During her time at Princeton, she was a producer for WPRB 103.3 FM News & Culture section, the station’s only long-form podcast-type program. She also wrote for The Daily Princetonian and tutored with the Petey Greene Program, which offers free tutoring to incarcerated people. She speaks Arabic and is a member of the Asian American Journalist Association and has studied in India and the United Kingdom.

Sarah Volpenhein

Sarah Volpenhein reports for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel where she focuses on the ethnic communities in Wisconsin, such as Native American and Hmong peoples. The focus for this reporter is less geographically oriented, and more critically focuses on diasporas that exist throughout Milwaukee and other parts of the state. Previously Volpenheim reported for the Marion Star in Marion, Ohio, covering business, the courts, and government accountability. She is an Investigative Reporters and Editors member who enjoys working with data. She won several awards from the Ohio Associated Press Media Editors for her reporting in Marion. Before joining the Star in 2017, she was criminal justice reporter for the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota, where she won first place North Dakota Newspaper Association awards for her reporting on the local jail and her breaking news coverage of a train collision with a school bus. She graduated from Ohio University in 2014 with degrees in journalism and Spanish. For the latter, she completed a study abroad program in Cuenca, Ecuador.

Jessica Rodriguez

Jessica Rodriguez is a reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel focusing on the undercovered Spanish-speaking neighborhoods on the city’s south side. Rodriguez has covered crime and breaking news in Naples, Florida, for the Naples Daily News. As a crime reporter, she covered issues that affect Latinos dealing with police and the criminal justice system, such as language barriers farm working communities face when reporting crimes. Prior to that, she interned at the Gainesville Sun as a reporter and photographer. Rodriguez graduated from the University of Florida in August 2018 and was born and raised in Hialeah, a city just outside of Miami. Rodriguez is of Cuban and Honduran descent. She spends most of her free time training in Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, a sport she has come to love.

Matthew Martinez

Matthew Martinez is a reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, covering low-income minority neighborhoods in Milwaukee's central city. Martinez is a 2020 graduate of  Marquette University, the Catholic Jesuit university in Milwaukee, where he worked on the Marquette Wire, the student news organization. As the executive editor last year, Martinez wrote a three-part series, “Left Behind,”  detailing a Marquette wrestler’s suicide in 1978. The series uncovered an altered suicide note and evidence of physical discipline against the student by a Jesuit priest. The project recently won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and Wisconsin Newspaper Association for in-depth reporting. Martinez has also edited and contributed to series about homelessness, human trafficking and healthcare, among other things. Last summer, he worked for Milwaukee Magazine as an editorial intern. He also worked in the SPJ newsroom during their Excellence in Journalism Conference in San Antonio last year.

Annika Hom

Annika Hom reports for Mission Local, a digital and investigative news outlet based in San Francisco that covers the entire city. Hom concentrates on inequality in the city’s Mission District.  Hom worked as a freelancer following her experience as a metro journalist at the Boston Globe and a news intern at SF WEEKLY. In December 2019, she graduated from Emerson College in Boston with a degree in journalism and a minor in poetry. She was an editor and reporter for the arts section of Emerson’s independent newspaper, The Berkeley Beacon. A native of Foster City, California, she’s the daughter of a Chinese-American father and Filipina mother. She speaks fluent Spanish.

Shaun Griswold

Shaun Griswold reports for New Mexico In Depth, where he focuses on the Native American population in Albuquerque, the state’s largest metropolitan area. It’s one of the first beats to focus on Native Americans in an urban setting. Griswold is a New Mexico journalist covering issues for southwest Indigenous people. He, himself, is a member of Laguna Pueblo, while also holding family ties to Jemez and Zuni Pueblos. He’s worked as a content producer KUSA-TV, the NBC affiliate in Denver, and on the assignments desk at KOB-TV, part of the Hubbard Broadcasting chain. He attended the University of New Mexico.

Keaton Ross

Keaton Ross covers underserved communities for Oklahoma Watch, a nonprofit investigative news outlet based in Oklahoma City. Ross is a spring 2020 graduate of Oklahoma Christian University where he served as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, The Talon. (He majored in journalism and minored in political science.) In March 2020, Ross’ reporting on an admissions counselor who led a racist activity at an area high school was cited by several national news outlets, including The New York Times. As an intern at The Oklahoman in 2019, Ross covered topics ranging from the national impact of the state’s opioid trial to a 93-year-old man riding his bike across Oklahoma. In 2018, Ross interned with The Norman Transcript.