WRITING

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.

Tobie Perkins

Tobie Nell Perkins reports for The Herald, Rock Hill, S.C. where she focuses on struggling Chester County, which is still reeling from decades of textile mill closures. Before coming to South Carolina, Perkins spent the last year writing feature and long-form stories for Fresh Take Florida, a news service based at the University of Florida where she graduated with a degree in journalism. Her stories, distributed through Fresh Take Florida, have been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, the Kentucky Herald-Leader and more. She has written for WUFT.org, the University of Florida’s NPR and PBS affiliate, since 2018. Tobie grew up near  Philadelphia, PA. She was the 2020 recipient of the John Paul Jones Jr. Award for Magazine Writing. Perkins was one of two nominees from the University of Florida to be chosen to compete for the National Hearst Award both in Feature Writing and Sports Writing. And she was a varsity member of the university’s Equestrian Team.

Humera Lodhi

Humera Lodhi reports for The Kansas City Star where she works as part of a team focusing on gun violence and uses her data skills to offer a deeper understanding of firearms statistics. She is a writer, programmer, multimedia creator and proud Missourian who has reported for various Missouri outlets such as the St. Louis Post Dispatch and KCUR on civil rights legislation, social media extremism and neglected public infrastructure. She was part of an award-winning research team that created a digital database mapping the British suppression of the African slave trade, created and produced a Snapchat series covering the midterm elections for Raycom Media and built an app for journalists that uncovered hidden relationships between topics using artificial intelligence. Lodhi graduated from the University of Missouri with degrees in journalism and statistics in 2019. Afterwards, she pursued a master’s degree in data journalism from Columbia University.

Kaitlin Washburn

Kaitlin Washburn reports for The Kansas City Star where she is part of a team examining gun violence in Missouri. As part of the team, Washburn reports in-depth on the politics of guns in the Missouri Legislature. This is her second tour of duty with Report for America. For the past year as an RFA member, she covered the omnipresent agriculture industry in California’s Central Valley for The Sun-Gazette. Prior to that, Washburn covered campaign finance and dark money for the Center for Responsive Politics, recreational cannabis and questionable state health care for The Oregonian and state politics for the Columbia Missourian. In 2019, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. At MU, her emphasis was in investigative reporting, and she spent three years as a researcher for Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Kristina Karisch

Kristina Karisch reports for The Modesto Bee and focuses on economic development and its impacts in Stanislaus County and the Northern San Joaquin Valley. She has covered politics and policy as an intern at The Washington Monthly and for the Medill News Service. She has also reported on local news for the West Seattle Herald, with a focus on transportation. Karisch graduated from Northwestern University in March with a degree in journalism and political science. She spent her time there reporting for The Daily Northwestern, where she was the paper’s city editor and managing editor. Karisch, who was born in Copenhagen to Austrian parents, grew up in Montreal and Denver and has been living in Seattle since 2016.

Ben Sessoms

Ben Sessoms covers housing, gentrification and related issues for The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a journalist from eastern North Carolina. Before joining RFA, Sessoms worked as a reporting fellow at News21 at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University where he and several other student journalists from across the country covered natural disaster response in the United States. Sessoms’ coverage focused on how impoverished communities in eastern North Carolina were impacted by two 500-year floods from hurricanes Matthew and Florence in 2016 and 2018. As a whole, the News21 project State of Emergency won the 2019 Investigative Reporters and Editors Student–Large award. Sessoms’ previous work can also be found in several North Carolina papers including the Statesville Record & Landmark, the Watauga Democrat, and The Appalachian, the student paper at his alma mater, Appalachian State University, where he was a top 15 debater in the U.S.

Abbie Shull

Abbie Shull reports for The News Tribune in Takoma, Washington, where she covers Joint Base Lewis-McChord military installation, a huge and underreported part of the local economy. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and previously covered the Louisiana legislature for The Manship Statehouse Bureau. Her byline can be seen in The Advocate, The Times-Picayune, 225 Magazine, The Advertiser and USA Today. Shull is a proud alumna of Louisiana State University’s campus newspaper, The Daily Reveille, where she served as managing editor. She earned her B.A. in mass communication with a focus in journalism at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication.

Conor Morris

Conor Morris reports for the Northeast Ohio Solutions Journalism Collaborative focusing on poverty in the city including housing, health and education. Morris covered Appalachian southeast Ohio for the weekly newspaper The Athens News for six years. He reported on Athens County, but especially local government, the campus of Ohio University (his alma mater), cops and courts, and the social and economic issues facing the residents of Ohio’s poorest county. Morris helped guide The News toward two Newspaper of the Year awards in its division of the annual Ohio News Media Association Hooper Contest. Morris himself won six first-place Hooper awards for his reporting over the years, including for a story series about police and hospital failures in a sexual- assault investigation in Athens. Morris was born in Marietta, Ohio.

Joan Meiners

Joan Meiners reports for The Spectrum in St. George, Utah, and focuses on the consequences of growth in Cedar City. Meiners has a Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of Florida, where she published multiple peer-reviewed scientific articles. As a journalist, she has written about the environment for Smithsonian Magazine, Discover Magazine, Orion Magazine and New Scientist Magazine. She spent 2019 as a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network investigating pollution from the oil and gas industry in southeast Louisiana for the ‘Polluter’s Paradise’ series, which won the Bayou Brief award for Louisiana’s Best Environment Reporting of 2019. The previous year, she got her start doing newspaper writing as an American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) fellow at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Before that, she produced data journalism for the award-winning series, ‘Peak Florida’ while still a graduate student.