2017 Fellows & Editors
JOE WERTZ Washington DC @joewertz
Joe Wertz is a senior environment and climate reporter for The Center for Public Integrity where recent stories include this one on agricultural fertilizer and climate change. When he was a fellow he worked at StateImpact Oklahoma, which investigates how government policy affects people.
BOYCE UPHOLT Cleveland, Mississippi @boyceupholt
Boyce Upholt is a freelance writer based in New Orleans, focusing on how we use and occupy the natural world. Boyce’s fellowship story on Monsanto’s herbicide dicamba won a 2019 award for investigative journalism from the James Beard Foundation. It was published by The New Republic in December 2018, read it here, “A Killing Season.” He is currently writing a book for W.W. Norton about what we’ve done to the Mississippi River.
DOUG BOCK CLARK, Durham, North Carolina, @dougbockclark
Doug Bock Clark is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, GQ, WIRED, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, and many other publications. His first book The Last Whalers was published in 2018 by Little, Brown and Company and was named one of the 100 best books of 2019 by The New York Times. He won the 2017 Reporting Award and was a finalist for the 2016 Mirror Award. He has been honored with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and two Fulbright Fellowships. You can find more of his work at www.dougbockclark.com.
Doug’s fellowship story was published in Rolling Stone magazine in March 2018, read it here “Why is China Treating North Carolina Like the Developing World?”
SANDY ALLEN Upstate, New York @sealln
Sandy Allen is a freelance writer whose debut book A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia was published in January 2018 by Scribner. Sandy received an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and is a former BuzzFeed features editor and co-founder of the online-literary quarterly Wag’s Revue. Sandy’s previously published features and essays can be found at hellosandyallen.com. Sandy is host of the podcast Mad Chat.
Sandy’s fellowship story on the history of psychiatric hospitals that were working farms aired on the podcast 99 Percent Invisible in October 2019.
MARISSA ORTEGA-WELCH, Oakland, California @radiomarissa
Marissa Ortega-Welch is a reporter and editor at KALW Public Radio. Her stories have also aired on KQED and Latino USA. She is a recipient of the USC Annenberg California Health Journalism Fellowship and the Latino USA California Endowment Health Reporting Fellowship. In addition to reporting, she enjoys teaching radio journalism, both at KALW and inside San Quentin state prison.
Marissa’s three part series on the history of agricultural pest control aired on KALW in December 2018, listen here Operation Pest Control Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
MADDIE OATMAN, San Francisco, California @moatman
Maddie Oatman is writer and senior editor at Mother Jones and the co-host of the magazine’s food politics podcast Bite. Her work has been featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and her story on Iowa’s barramundi farmers recently won a first place award from the Association of Food Journalists.
Maddie’s fellowship stories on immigrant workers and the wine country fires were published in the January/February 2018 and July/August 2018 issues of Mother Jones. Read them here: “Escaping a Wildfire and Fighting to Stay Here” and”Grapes of Fear.”
CHRIS HARLAND-DUNAWAY, Studio City, California @chrishdeee
Chris wrote for cycling magazines before he became an independent radio producer. He is a recent graduate from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism with recent investigative work for Reveal. In April he is releasing a story podcast called, The Side of the Road, about an epic 125-year-old bicycle race through the Ardennes forest in Belgium.
EVE ABRAMS New Orleans, Louisiana @Eve_Abrams
Eve Abrams produces Unprisoned, a Peabody finalist and Gabriel Award winning radio and podcast series which tells stories about the root causes of mass incarceration and the ways our families, neighborhoods, and notions of justice are impacted by the criminal legal system. She won an Edward R. Murrow Award for her documentary series Along Saint Claude, and has reported stories on everything from birdsong to the domestic slave trade for a variety of public radio programs. For more see eabrams.com.
Eve’s two part radio series aired on Marketplace in February 2018. Listen here, “Farm-to-table comes to a Louisiana jail,” and “Montana inmates learn job and life skills while raising cattle on prison ranch.”
CAITLIN DEWEY, Buffalo New York, @caitlindewey
Caitlin Dewey is an enterprise reporter for The Buffalo News and the former food policy reporter at the Washington Post. The fellowship supported several food related stories including this one on the herbicide dicamba published in the Washington Post in August 2017 “This miracle weed killer was supposed to save farms. Instead, it’s devastating them.”
JOE FASSLER, Denver, Colorado @joefassler
Joe Fassler is deputy editor at The Counter, a digital magazine about the political, economic, and cultural forces shaping the way we eat. He’s also a longtime contributor to The Atlantic, where he runs the “By Heart” series of author interviews, recently collected in Light the Dark: Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process (Penguin, 2017). In 2011, his food and public health reporting for TheAtlantic.com was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award in Journalism.
Joe’s fellowship story “The Man Who’s Going to Save Your Neighborhood Grocery Store” was published by Longreads in April 2019.
GUEST EDITORS
CORBY KUMMER
Corby Kummer is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of The Joy of Coffee and The Pleasures of Slow Food, the first book in English on the Slow Food movement. He has been restaurant critic of New York, Boston, and Atlanta Magazines and food and food policy columnist for The New Republic. He is editor-in-chief of Ideas: The Magazine of the Aspen Institute and is launching Food and Society at the Aspen Institute, a program dedicated to improving the country’s food supply and public health. He is a weekly featured commentator on food and food policy on WGBH’s Boston Public Radio. He has received five James Beard Journalism Awards.
DEBORAH GEORGE
Deborah George is a Senior Editor at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. She’s also a contributing editor with the long-running Radio Diaries series, which airs on All Things Considered (NPR News). She was a staffer at NPR for 20 years. Her documentary work has garnered two Peabody Awards, in 2009 for The Great Textbook War and Clarissa’s Diary in 2012 and five Dupont Awards from Columbia University.
JACK HITT
Jack Hitt is the creator and co-host of the 2018 Peabody Award-winning podcast, Uncivil as well as a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine and the public radio program This American Life. He is the author of several books most recently Bunch of Amateurs. His first book Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route into Spain was made into a motion picture “The Way” directed by Emilio Estévez and starring Martin Sheen. His Harper’s report on American anthropology was selected for a collection of the best science writing of the past 25 years The Best of the Best of American Science Writing. His one-man show “Making Up the Truth” is a series of his slightly incredible real-life stories woven in with the contemporary brain science that nearly answers the question “Is any of this true?”
CLARA JEFFERY
Clara Jeffery became editor-in-chief of Mother Jones in May 2015. Prior to that she was co-editor with Monika Bauerlein. She has spearheaded an era of editorial growth and innovation, marked by the addition of now 13-person Washington bureau, an overhaul of the organization’s digital strategy and a corresponding 15-fold growth in traffic, and the winning of two National Magazine Awards for general excellence. When Jeffery and Bauerlein received a PEN award for editing in 2012, the judges noted: “With its sharp, compelling blend of investigative long-form journalism, eye-catching infographics and unapologetically confident voice, Mother Jones under Jeffery and Bauerlein has been transformed from what was a respected—if under-the-radar—indie publication to an internationally recognized, powerhouse general-interest periodical influencing everything from the gun-control debate to presidential campaigns. In addition to their success on the print side, Jeffery and Bauerlein’s relentless attention to detail, boundless curiosity and embrace of complex subjects are also reflected on the magazine’s increasingly influential website, whose writers and reporters often put more well-known and deep-pocketed news divisions to shame. Before joining the staff of Mother Jones, Jeffery was a senior editor of Harper’s magazine. Fourteen pieces that she personally edited have been finalists for National Magazine Awards, in the categories of essay, profile, reporting, public interest, feature, and fiction. Works she edited have also been selected to appear in various editions of Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Sports Writing, and Best American Science Writing. Clara cut her journalistic teeth at Washington City Paper, where she wrote and edited political, investigative, and narrative features, and was a columnist. Jeffery is a graduate of Carleton College and Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. She resides in the Mission District of San Francisco.
FELLOWSHIP EDITORS
MICHAEL POLLAN
Michael Pollan is the author of seven books, including How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, he is also the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley. In 2010, Time Magazine named Michael one of the 100 most influential people in the world. @michaelpollan
MALIA WOLLAN
Malia Wollan is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine where she writes the weekly Tip column. Her work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harper’s, National Public Radio, New York Magazine, the Associated Press and PBS’s Frontline/World. She has lectured at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, is a former editor at Meatpaper magazine, and is the director of this fellowship. @mwollan