WRITING

Amanda Ulrich

Amanda Ulrich reports for The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California, where she focuses on Native American issues in Riverside and San Bernardino. Ulrich was already based in Palm Springs when she joined Report for America so she knows the area well. She has reported from the United Kingdom, Italy, the Caribbean, and in cities across the U.S., covering topics ranging from marginalized communities to environmental issues. Before relocating to Southern California in 2019, Ulrich worked as a reporter and web editor for a newspaper in the British Virgin Islands. While there, she wrote about local government and the many long-standing impacts of Hurricane Irma, which decimated the region in 2017. Ulrich started her journalism career as a reporting fellow for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in 2016. She is a graduate of Wake Forest University and hails from Vienna, Virginia.

Abbey Marshall

Abbey Marshall reports for The Devil Strip, a community-owned, independent news outlet in Akron, Ohio, where she focuses on how economic trends affect ordinary citizens. Marshall is a 2020 graduate of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, where she studied on a full academic scholarship awarded to a student pursuing a career in reporting. Throughout her collegiate career, she completed two internships at The Columbus Dispatch as a metro reporter and web producer. She recently returned from Washington, D.C., where she covered breaking news as an intern at Politico. Having worked at a nonprofit in Mumbai, studied French and media in Aix-en-Provence and covered politics in the nation’s capital, she ultimately realized she missed the state she calls home and the fight for solid local journalism.

Adam Willis

Adam Willis reports for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead in North Dakota, where he covers statewide business issues and elections. Before moving to North Dakota, Willis was a freelance journalist and researcher based in Washington, D.C. His freelance work has covered religion, human rights, higher ed and regional politics and has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Politico Magazine, The Boston Globe and other national publications. In the fall of 2018 and spring of 2019, he reported on the response of the Catholic Church to President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly war on drugs in the Philippines, a project supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Willis has also worked as a Washington reporting fellow for The Texas Tribune, where he covered Texas politics on Capitol Hill. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia.

Nadia Lopez

Nadia Lopez covers Latino issues in the San Joaquin Valley for The Fresno Bee. Before that, she worked as a city hall reporter for San José Spotlight, where she covered politics, government, the housing crisis and homelessness. Her groundbreaking stories have led to shifts in local elections and policy changes. She has won several awards, including two California Journalism Awards in the writing and land-use categories for a story that involved spending the night on an overnight bus that homeless residents used as shelter and for covering displacement in the city’s historic East Side. She grew up in Chula Vista, California, a border town. She received her B.A. from San Francisco State University.

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.

Liz Teitz

Liz Teitz covers housing affordability for the Ouray County Plaindealer, a weekly paper that’s been publishing for over a century in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado. Teitz previously covered higher education and state politics for Hearst Connecticut Media Group through the Hearst Journalism Fellowship. She has also covered education for the San Antonio Express-News, and written about local government, schools, courts and disaster recovery in Southeast Texas for the Beaumont Enterprise. Teitz grew up in Rhode Island and has a B.A. in American Studies from Georgetown University.

Kyle Pfannenstiel

Kyle Pfannenstiel is a reporter for the Post Register in Idaho Falls, Idaho, covering rural healthcare. The Register covers the eastern part of the state as well as parts of Montana and Wyoming. Pfannenstiel began his reporting career at University of Idaho’s student newspaper, The Argonaut. Soon after, he covered the Idaho State Legislature as an intern for Idaho Public Radio and the McClure Center for Public Policy Research. Pfannenstiel continued to cover government and politics for The Idaho Press in Nampa, where he reported on a 2018 ballot initiative to expand Medicaid access for Idahoans. He will graduate in May with a B.S. in journalism and political science from University of Idaho, which is located in Idaho’s panhandle. His last name means panhandle in German.

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.