I report and produce audio stories that help listeners understand how other people experience life and the forces that shape people’s lives.

I developed, host, and produce the podcast Outsiders, chronicling homeless life in one city for a year, with The Seattle Times. The project was made as part of a 2019 fellowship through USC’s Center for Health Journalism.

My journey from print to audio journalism runs through Central America.

It started when I was a newspaper reporter in New York, where I grew up. One day, I got curious: How was it possible so many farm workers in the area I covered were from the same town in Guatemala?

So I bought a digital recorder, studied Spanish, and used vacation days to fly there. 

Eventually, I tracked down the first person to migrate from the town of San Raymundo to the farms of Long Island 40 years earlier.

That story aired on NPR, won a regional Edward R. Murrow award, and gave me a new mission in life: to keep making audio journalism. Since 2016, I’ve worked for the Seattle NPR station KNKX.

My reporting on the intersection of race and homelessness won regional Edward R. Murrow and Society of Professional Journalists awards. An investigation I co-reported into dysfunction in a county medical examiner’s office won a regional Society of Professional Journalists award for investigative reporting.

In addition to NPR and some of its member stations, my work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, and the websites of The Atlantic and National Geographic.

I think a lot about why we tell stories the way we tell them, how to communicate across cultural and political divides, and how to make journalism that more accurately reflects what it feels like to be alive.

When I'm not doing that, I'm training for marathons, learning songs on guitar, going on road trips, and walking my nervous dog around Seattle.