WRITING

Leah Willingham

Leah Willingham covers the Mississippi Legislature for The Associated Press where she concentrates on poverty issues. Before this, she reported for the Concord Monitor in N.H. and holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Mount Holyoke College. She was named the New England Newspaper and Press Association’s ‘Rookie of the Year’ in 2018 and has won two New England News & Press Association’s Publick Occurrences Awards in 2018 and 2019, one for a project on younger-onset Alzheimer’s, and another on teen suicide prevention. She was part of a group of Monitor reporters that won first place in investigative reporting from NENPA in its 2019 Better Newspaper Competition. The stories followed how local school district officials handled reports from students about a teacher arrested for sexual assault. Willingham is the recipient of the 2018 National Alliance for the Mentally New Hampshire Annual Media Award and two New Hampshire Press Association first place awards for health reporting and general news.

Iris Samuels

Iris Samuels covers gubernatorial and congressional elections in Montana for The Associated Press. Based in Helena, the state capital, she also covers policy issues that bear on the lives of the state’s one million citizens who face a dearth of statewide coverage. No stranger to the West, Samuels reported and investigated stories on local government, education, and healthcare for the Kodiak Daily Mirror in Alaska. It’s a world away from Israel, where she was raised and completed her mandatory military service as an intelligence analyst. (Samuels is a dual American and Israeli citizen who speaks Arabic, English, French, and Hebrew.) She is a summa cum laude graduate from Princeton where she won the John McPhee Award for Independent Journalism for her on-scene coverage of the refugee crisis in Europe based on interviews in Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Germany. In college, she also covered education for regional news outlets including public radio station WHYY in Philadelphia and penned a column for the Daily Princetonian.

Sophia Eppolito

Sophia Eppolito covers the Utah Legislature for The Associated Press where she concentrates on the intersection of religion and state government. As a news associate for The AP in New York City, she wrote about crime and community news on the East Coast. Previously, she worked at The Boston Globe for two years covering general assignment stories and breaking news. She also worked as a Massachusetts Statehouse Correspondent for the Lowell Sun where she reported on the rollout of recreational marijuana and climate change. A Los Angeles native, she attended Boston University where she received the Blue Chip Award, the highest student honor conferred by the BU College of Communication.

Michelle Griffith

Michelle Griffith reports for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead in North Dakota. She focuses on the decline and rise of rural America, told through a North Dakota lens, including coverage of economic development, jobs the people who make up these communities. Griffith covered breaking news and enterprise stories while interning at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. She was the Campus Activities Editor for the Minnesota Daily, the University of Minnesota’s independent student newspaper, where she oversaw coverage on topics like diversity, student life and research. Griffith was also a founding member of the Minnesota Daily’s Content Diversity Board, which analyzed the paper’s coverage of minority communities and trained reporters on best practices for covering marginalized groups. She grew up in Buffalo, Minnesota and graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2020 with a degree in journalism.

Renee Hickman

Renee Hickman is a reporter for the Wausau Daily Herald. At the Wisconsin paper, she covers population loss and its consequences, including everything from examining the dearth of tax revenue on school districts to the difficulties staffing hospitals face during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hickman has covered local government for the Unified Newspaper Group in Verona, Wisconsin, after completing a Fulbright Fellowship to Ukraine, where she researched and reported on local journalism. She has covered agriculture, foreign affairs and other topics while freelancing and interning at the NBC News Political Unit and Bloomberg BNA. In 2018, she graduated with a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, where she worked as a research assistant at Investigative Reporters and Editors, was awarded a scholarship from the White House Correspondents’ Association, and won the school’s O.O. McIntyre Writing Award. Prior to her career in journalism, Hickman worked for several years in a variety of non-profit roles and received an undergraduate degree in history from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is from Rome, Georgia.

Megan Stringer

Megan Stringer reports for the Wichita Eagle, where she focuses on issues facing the working class including the decline in unions and changes to state worker compensation laws. (Wichita is a major manufacturing center.)  It’s a perfect fit for Stringer, who covered business and economic development for the Wausau Daily Herald and across Wisconsin for the USA Today Network. Her stories touched on everything from manufacturing to restaurants. While in school, Stringer was an associate editor for 14 East Magazine in Chicago, the Online student-run Publication of DePaul University where she focused on engagement and multimedia journalism. She also interned in the consumer investigation unit of NBC5 Chicago. Stringer grew up in the greater St. Louis area.

Sarah Spicer

Sarah Spicer reports for The Wichita Eagle and focuses on climate change in the region. While many news stories focus on climate change on the coasts, Kansas and the Midwest are seeing its effects, too, in terms of everything from extreme weather to cattle prices. An award winning investigative reporter, Spicer has been studying investigative techniques at The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for the past year. While there, she worked as a student assistant for Columbia Journalism Investigations in partnership with ProPublica, investigating dating apps and sexual assault. She was Editor-in-Chief of her college paper, The Bulletin, at Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas, for two years. While there, she wrote a groundbreaking investigative series about a professor who sexually assaulted an undergraduate student and how the university handled Title IX cases. The Kansas Press Association awarded the piece the best investigative story of the year, and The Bulletin won the Liberty Bell Award for Outstanding Service from the Chase and Lyon County Bar Association and the Above and Beyond Award from the Kansas Sunshine Coalition for the coverage. Spoon was born and raised in Neodesha, Kansas.

Mark Rosenberg

Mark Rosenberg reports for The Victoria Advocate, the second oldest paper in Texas, where he reports on the rural counties surrounding the small city on the coastal plains. Rosenberg reported on criminal justice as an intern at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where he contributed to Accused, the Enquirer ’s true-crime podcast. Previously, he worked as a breaking news intern at the Toledo Blade, reporting on public policy and rural politics. He earned his B.A. from Yale University, where he served as editor-in-chief of The New Journal, a magazine that publishes narrative and investigative reporting. He is from Lexington, Massachusetts.

Shivani Patel

Shivani Patel reports for The Ventura Star in Camarillo, California, where she focuses on education, the disparity between expenditures and outcomes and how a 2014 state school funding law is affecting children. Patel knows the Pacific Coast. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, and she has been a staff writer, assistant editor and web editor for The Malibu Times, a hyperlocal publication based in Malibu, California. She reported on everything from breaking news to public meetings and developed a beat covering public school education. Shivani won several awards for coverage of two major 2018 events: the Malibu Creek State Park shooting and the Woolsey Fire. In 2017, she graduated with a B.S. in journalism and concentration in Spanish from Boston University. Patel has won the Foot in the Door Fellowship from the L.A. Press Club and several awards from the California News Publishers Association, among other honors.

Brandon Pho

Brandon Pho reports for Voice of OC, a publication in Santa Ana, California, where he covers North Central Orange County, a diverse area with thriving Korean, Vietnamese and Hispanic communities. For the past two years as an intern at Voice of OC and in writing for other publications, he has held local governments accountable. In 2019, his investigation revealed local county fair officials spending hundreds of thousands of public dollars on special dinners for themselves and uncovered a conflict-of-interest scandal involving the fair’s CEO, who was eventually fired. As the son of a Vietnamese American immigrant, Pho was senior editor for his college newspaper, The Daily Titan at Cal State Fullerton, where his work garnered first place honors at the Los Angeles Press Club and the College Media Association. His reporting has landed him on public radio, and his work has been cited in federal court. IN 2018, He won first place for Best Breaking News and second place for Best Feature Story from the College Media Association. Pho was also a Mark of Excellence finalist in 2018 for breaking news reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists.