2018-2019

Caity Coyne

Caity Coyne was the editor-in-chief of West Virginia University’s award-winning, independent student newspaper, The Daily Athanaeum, and a reporting intern at the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Coyne is originally from San Diego, CA, but she found a home in West Virginia as a student. As a RFA corps member and Galloway Fellow, Caity reports on the state’s southern coalfields for the Charleston Gazette-Mail. She has tenaciously covered a statewide teachers’ strike and featured a once-booming coal town that may be forced to dissolve as a municipality.  More Caity

Molly Born

Molly Born, a native of West Virginia, worked for six years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where she covered crime, local government, and education. In pursuit of the story, she spent the night at a palatial Hare Krishna commune, reported on location from the middle of a four-lane highway, and (politely) commandeered a passing car to hear the verdict in a murder trial. She’s a graduate of Fairmont State University and has a masters in journalism from Northwestern University. She has long carried a bit of West Virginia everywhere she goes — in the form of a tattoo of the state’s motto on her back. As an RFA corps member and Galloway Fellow, Molly now reports for West Virginia Public Broadcasting. She has already investigated the plight of a town whose water was contaminated by a coal mine owned by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice and explored how a lack of reliable internet access is hurting rural economies.  More Molly.

Will Wright

Will Wright covered the environment and government accountability during internships at the Sacramento Bee, the Lexington Herald-Leader and the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. He was editor-in-chief of University of Kentucky’s independent student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel. After graduating from University of Kentucky in December 2016, Wright completed a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. He grew up in Eighty Four, PA, a small town outside Pittsburgh. Since joining RFA as a Galloway Fellow, Will has been awarded the McClatchy President’s Award for Journalism Excellence and a First Place Kentucky Press Association Award for his ongoing coverage of water in Eastern Kentucky and holding public agencies accountable. Watchdog reporting in Eastern Kentucky Wright has reopened the Lexington Herald Leader’s Pike County Bureau in Kentucky. He already put a spotlight on Kentucky’s “worst water district” where some residents went without water for weeks. The district’s business manager retired shortly after publication, and the state committed $3.4 million to fix water issues in eastern Kentucky. Will also collaborated with veteran reporter Bill Estep to break a story about $3 million in back taxes owed by Kentucky-based coal companies linked to West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice. Will continues this work in his second year as a Report for America corps member.

Manny Ramos

Ramos is a two-time Fellow at City Bureau, a civic journalism lab based on the South Side, for which he covered the Chicago Police Department’s community-policing initiatives and worked as a public health multimedia reporter in collaboration with WBEZ’s Curious City. He also served as a journalism mentor for underserved youth via Free Spirit Media. Prior to this, Ramos reported on city politics and Chicago Public Schools for Gaper’s Block and covered municipal elections for the Daily Line. He was an editorial intern for the Chicago Reader and The Depaulia’s first podcast producer and political reporter. Reporting on Chicago's South and West Sides Ramos has joined the Chicago Sun-Times, where he will focus on Chicago’s south and west sides, including the neighborhood where he was raised.

Samantha Max

Samantha Max was an investigative reporting intern for the Medill Justice Project and a bilingual multimedia news intern at Hoy, Chicago Tribune’s Spanish-language daily. She returned to her hometown of Baltimore in 2015 and again in 2016 to work as a newsroom intern for NPR-affiliate WYPR. She has written on immigration and the criminal justice system. Samantha spent her first year with Report for America at The Telegraph in Macon, Georgia, where she covered health and inequity in central Georgia. For her second year as a corps member, she’ll cover the criminal justice system for Nashville Public Radio.  

Sarah Anne Hughes

Sarah Anne Hughes has worked as an editor and reporter in Washington, DC and her home state of Pennsylvania. She began her career at The Washington Post, where she blogged about pop culture and national news. Hughes has worked as a reporter for The Incline, editor-in-chief for DCist, and managing editor of Washington City Paper. In the past year, Hughes returned to her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where she has been working as a freelancer. She joins The Incline / Billy Penn as their first statehouse reporter in Harrisburg. Check out her work for Billy Penn and The Incline

Obed Manuel

Until recently, Obed he was an associate editor at Central Track in Dallas, where he was focused on city news/politics and social change movements. He previously worked as managing editor of Latina Lista, where he launched a weekly podcast and wrote on immigration and technology. A graduate of the Mayborn School of Journalism at University of North Texas, Manuel was a staff writer for the North Texas Daily and a two-time intern at the Dallas Observer. In 2015, Manuel assisted former Dallas Observer editor Joe Tone with research for “Bones,” a book about money laundering through the quarter horse racing industry. A native of the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, Manuel reports on the growing population of second-generation Hispanic immigrants and the issues they face.

Michelle Liu

Michelle was a reporting intern for the Toledo Blade, and a general assignment intern for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. As a reporter for the Yale Daily News and a contributing reporter for the New Haven Independent, she shadowed canvassers in New Hampshire and covered labor unions in Connecticut. She was also a program coordinator for Yale’s Summer Journalism Program for high school students. Since joining Report for America, Liu has covered criminal justice for Mississippi Today. The Institute for Non-Profit News named Michelle’s reporting on the spike of prison deaths in Mississippi as one of the “Best in Nonprofit News” in 2018. Her continued reporting on this and other stories not only helped lead the MDOC to invite the FBI to get involved in the investigation of these deaths, but her dogged records requests were cited by the Department of Corrections while asking the Legislature to exempt agencies from parts of the Public Records Act. More recently, the Mississippi Humanities Council invited Michelle to moderate a panel titled, “Locked Up: Criminal Justice in Mississippi.” She continues this work in her second year with Report for America.

Mallory Falk

Mallory is a two-time Edward R. Murrow Regional Award-winner, a 2016 USC Annenberg National Health Reporting Fellow, and a radio journalist whose stories have aired on All Things Considered, Here & Now, and Texas Standard. She was an education reporter for New Orleans’ NPR-affiliate WWNO and a producer of What My Students Taught Me, an education podcast from The Atlantic and Columbia Journalism School’s Teacher Project. Earlier she served as communications director for Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools. Originally from Pittsburgh, Falk is a graduate of Middlebury College and the Transom Story Workshop.In her first year with Report for America, Mallory was a multimedia reporter for KRWG in New Mexico, covering education, healthcare, economic development and sustainability. In her second year, she will join Texas News Hub, based at KERA, to cover the borderlands and El Paso.

Eric Shelton

Eric Shelton is a photojournalist whose work has been published in the Boston Globe, LA Times, New York Times, USA Today, and Washington Post. He first left his home state of Mississippi to intern with the Associated Press in Boston. He worked across Texas and Mississippi as a photojournalist for Texarkana Gazette and the Natchez Democrat, a multimedia journalist for the Abilene Reporter-News, and digital reporter and chief photographer for the Hattiesburg American. He then worked as photo editor of the Killeen Daily Herald, managing photo and video for five publications. Eric has won awards from the Mississippi Associated Press Managing Editors and the Arkansas Press Photographers Association. He returned to Mississippi to become the first photojournalist at Mississippi Today. He continues with us for a second year.