Simply walking down the street is an opportunity to find stories waiting to be told. Although my background is in education reporting, I have never felt truly confined to a “beat”; instead I’ve allowed my curiosity to uncover stories hiding in the random, everyday places that make up the world, like a single sentence in an otherwise dry state report, a conversation with a local business owner or an inquisition about my garbage can. In practice, that means I tend to pursue investigative and explanatory stories; often, they focus on topics that go under-reported or mis-reported within the mainstream media.
I have a B.A. in English Literature and Journalism from the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities. Much of my learning as a college student in my hometown of Minneapolis stemmed from working at the independent campus newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, including as editor-in-chief.
After graduation I spent the summer in Phoenix, Arizona covering national politics for the Arizona Republic as part of the Pulliam Journalism Fellowship. From there I moved to Iowa City, Iowa, where I covered education for the Iowa City Press-Citizen and Des Moines Register for two years. I currently live in Madison, Wisconsin, where I am getting started on a long-form narrative project.
I was selected an “Outstanding Young Iowa Journalist” by the Iowa Newspaper Association in 2021. I was also awarded “Best News Story” that year for my reporting on the history of tuition increases at Iowa public universities.
Mission and ethics
I’ve always been obsessed with the relatively simplistic mission of journalism: to gather facts, verify them, put them into context and share them to others’ benefit. Beholden to a recognition that doing so is far easier said than done, I’m constantly questioning how I, or any journalist, can achieve that mission — how to research a topic well enough to report it with authority; how to gather perspectives from a diverse audience; how my own identity may inadvertently shape the questions I ask.
I don’t claim to have an answer or a solution. But I do make a conscious choice to think critically about the decisions I make and act as an advocate for well-researched, accurate and ethical reporting.