WRITING

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.

K. Sophie Will

K. Sophie Will reports for The Spectrum in St. George, Utah, where she focuses on the major national parks in the area—Bryce Canyon, Zion, and the Grand Canyon—and the consequences of growth and tourism. Being in Utah marks a return for Will, who grew up in Draper, Utah. She is an investigative data journalist who has covered everything from local government to major human rights violations at investigative multimedia internships with NBC 10 Boston, HuffPost, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting/WGBH and The Deseret News. She has also covered daily metro news at the Boston Globe as well as climate change and women’s rights at the Thomson Reuters Foundation in London. At Boston University, where she graduated with her bachelor’s in journalism in May 2020, she was the managing editor and the pioneering in-depth and data editor at the BU News Service.

Orion Donovan-Smith

Orion Donovan-Smith covers Congress and Washington, D.C., for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington. He worked as the Investigative Reporting Workshop fellow on the documentary “Plastic Wars,” a Frontline investigation into recycling and the plastics industry. Prior to that, he was an intern and later a part-time producer at the NPR program “1A” in 2019, while finishing a master’s degree in journalism from American University. Earlier in the program, he worked with the investigative team and as a general assignment reporter at The Washington Post, covering immigration. Before turning to journalism, he worked on international development programs in Central Africa. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington.

Rebecca Liebson

Rebecca Liebson reports for The State in Columbia, S.C. and focuses on public and substandard housing in the state capital. Rebecca Liebson was part of the New York Times’ inaugural fellowship class. She worked for The Weekly, The Times’ first-ever television news series, helping to produce episodes about a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes, the culture of sexual harassment in the world of yoga and more. Liebson has also written for the metro desk where she led The Times’ breaking news coverage of an anti-Semitic attack on a Rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York. Before she arrived at The Times, Liebson held internships at NBC, The New York Post and WSHU Public Radio. She graduated from Stony Brook University in 2019. Her work for The Statesman student newspaper earned her a Hearst Award for Enterprise Writing as well as the title of Best College News Reporter from the Press Club of Long Island for two consecutive years.