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Neil Shea 

Neil Shea is the author of Frostlines: A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic. For over 20 years he’s covered conflict, climate, and cultural transformation around the world for National Geographic, and he’s also a contributing editor with the Virginia Quarterly Review and The American Scholar. Neil also writes for film, television, and podcasts. His investigative podcast series, Unfinished: Deep South, about the life, legacy, and unsolved lynching of a wealthy Black farmer at the dawn of the Civil Rights era, was nominated for Peabody Award in 2020.

Michelle Nijhuis

Michelle Nijhuis is the author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, a history of the modern conservation movement that was named one of the best books of 2021 by The Chicago Tribune, Smithsonian Magazine, Booklist, and other publications.

Michelle writes about conservation and climate change for publications including National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, and she’s a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and a longtime contributing editor of High Country News, an independent magazine that produces some of the finest journalism in the American West.

Her work has won several national honors, including two AAAS/Kavli Science Journalism Awards and inclusion in four Best American anthologies, and it’s been generously supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the Food and Environment Reporting Network.

Michelle is also the co-editor of The Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish and Prosper in the Digital Age, and the author of The Science Writers’ Essay Handbook: How to Craft Compelling True Stories in Any Medium.

After fifteen years of living off the electrical grid in rural Colorado, Michelle and her family now live in White Salmon, Washington. (And if you’re wondering about her last name, it rhymes with “my house.”)

Chris Mooney 

Chris Mooney is an assistant professor of practice at the University of Virginia’s Environmental Institute. Before transitioning to academia, he spent over a decade at The Washington Post covering climate change, earning a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for his team's work on the series “2 Degrees C: Beyond the Limit.” His reporting has exposed critical environmental issues, such as countries under-reporting their greenhouse gas emissions and the dramatic rise in sea levels impacting the American South. His work remains at the forefront of climate journalism, highlighting the urgent need for awareness and global action.

Preeti Simran Sethi

Preeti Simran Sethi is an award-winning journalist and 2023-2024 Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow working on a book on South Asian mental health and healing through altered states. Named one of the “50 Most Influential Global Indians” by Vogue India and the “environmental messenger” by Vanity Fair, she has written for outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Guernica, and The Guardian. Sethi was designated one of the top eight women saving the planet by Marie Claire and is the author of Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love about the loss of biodiversity through the lens of flavor and terroir.

Kenneth Rosen

Kenneth R. Rosen is an independent journalist. He is a former Logan Nonfiction Fellow and a visiting research scholar at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Atavist, New York, The New York Times and Foreign Affairs, among other publications. He has reported from the Middle East, North Africa, and across North America.

Neda Ulaby

Neda Ulaby reports on arts, entertainment, and cultural trends for NPR's Arts Desk. She began there as a production assistant in 2000. Recent stories have ranged from a profile of the first woman nominated for an Oscar for cinematography to a piece about how a “broken orchestra” in Philadelphia returned unplayable instruments to public school children to an exploration of the origins of the expression “thirst trap.”

Scouring the various and often overlapping worlds of art, music, television, film, new media and literature, Neda Ulaby's radio and online stories reflect political and economic realities, cultural issues, obsessions and transitions, as well as artistic adventurousness— and awesomeness.

Ms. Ulaby hosted the Emmy-Award winning public television series Arab American Stories, and has worked at newspapers in Topeka, KS and Chicago, IL. A former doctoral student in literature and film at the University of Chicago, she graduated from Bryn Mawr College. Ms. Ulaby was born in Amman, Jordan and grew up in the idyllic Midwestern college towns of Lawrence, Kansas and Ann Arbor, Michigan, where, throughout her youth, she was an undistinguished student of the violin.

Craig Medred

Craig Medred is an Alaska journalist known for following stories wherever they go. A �鶹ԭ��F alum, his career began at KTVA in Fairbanks and went through Washington, D.C., and Juneau on the way to a nearly 30-year run as a reporter and columnist at the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch, and Alaska Dispatch News. Unable to let go of a passion for the stories of Alaska, its people, and its tangled politics, he now writes and edits at craigmedred.news where he remains both loved and hated and happy to make readers think.

Mark Kelley

Mark Kelley is an award-winning Alaska photojournalist and his books have sold over a quarter million copies. His bestseller “Alaska: A Photographic Excursion” is a Benjamin Franklin Award recipient. Mark graduated from �鶹ԭ��F with a degree in journalism in 1978. He worked for 14 years as a daily newspaper photojournalist and became a freelance photographer in 1993.

Micheal Davis

Digital information evangelist Michael Davis is a backpack journalist with 40-plus years of experience as a reporter, photographer, editor and news executive at outlets ranging from the Chicago Sun Times to TV Guide. He’s the author of Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, a 2009 NYT bestseller, and co-produced the documentary adaptation. He founded and operates NewsHawk Media, a content creation and consulting business based in Salem, Oregon.

Dorothy Parvaz

Dorothy Parvaz has worked as a senior producer at Al Jazeera based out of New York and Doha, focusing on human rights and conflict. She was previously the digital special projects editor for the network, where she crafted spotlight coverage on key stories and reported on political issues and democracy in several countries, including Egypt, Libya and Afghanistan.

In the course of reporting on the uprisings in the Middle East, she was “disappeared” in Syria and was among the first to report on the secret prisons and torture centers there. She was transferred to Iran's Evin prison where she spent over two weeks being interrogated before being released.

Carolyn Cole

LA Times Photojournalist, Cole's work spans the globe - documenting wars, refugees and political upheaval. Among her many honors: the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography, and two Robert Capa Gold Medals, NPPA Newspaper Photographer of the Year and World Press Photo awards.

Matt McGrath

Originally from Tipperary in Ireland, Matt edited computer magazines for several years before joining BBC Radio 5 live at its launch in 1994. Following stints as producer and reporter, Matt became the station's science specialist in 1997. He joined the BBC World Service in 2006 as environment reporter.

He has covered some of the major issues in science and environment in that period including mad cow disease, cloning, global warming and GM food.

Highlights include reporting from the solar eclipse in the UK in 1999 and travelling to the Arctic in 2007. Matt tested the temperatures in Copenhagen by jumping into the icy harbour waters during the UN summit in 2009. He has reported from many parts of the world and almost every American state, apart from Alaska!

Over the years Matt has also reported extensively on the scientific impacts of doping in sport.

He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010-11.

Susan W. White

Executive Editor, InsideClimate News

In May 2013, Susan White’s seven-person newsroom at InsideClimateNews.org received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for “The Dilbit Disaster: The Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never heard Of.” Three years earlier, White’s investigative team at ProPublica.org landed the first-ever Pulitzer awarded to an online news organization. This former San Diego Union-Tribune editor is, arguably, industry’s leading figure today defining serious digital journalism.

David E. Sanger

Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power

David E. Sanger is Chief Washington Correspondent of the New York Times, where he has been a member of two teams that won the Pulitzer Prize. He has also won numerous awards for coverage of the presidency and foreign policy. Mr. Sanger is author of two New York Times best-sellers: “The Inheritance’’ (2009), and most recently, “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power’’(2012). As a visiting senior fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, he has taught national security policy. 

Sandra Dolbee

Sandi Dolbee became a journalist sometime between the birth of Jesus and the death of Elvis. She’s worked at newspapers from Washington state to California, including her hometown newspaper, The San Jose Mercury News. Most recently, she was the religion and ethics editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune, pioneering a beat she broadly defined as what people believe and how they behave. She’s been nominated for the Pulitizer Prize in beat reporting and is the recipient of several national journalism awards, including honors from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, the National Federation of Press Women, and the Religion Newswriters Association. She is a former president of the Religion Newswriters Association, which represents journalists who cover religion in secular media in the United States and Canada. Sandi’s won fellowships to attend seminars in specialized journalism at the University of Maryland, New York University and the University of Southern California. In 2008, she was the recipient of a Templeton fellowship to study religion and science at the University of Cambridge, England. Her project was on the science of forgiveness. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and sociology from Central Washington University. She is currently a freelance writer and editor, and is completing a novel in which one of the main characters -- surprise, surprise -- is a journalist. She lives in San Diego, Ca.

Jacqueline Thomas

Jacqueline Thomas is an award-winning journalist who now teaches and works as a freelance writer and editor. In more than 30 years in journalism, she served as Senior Editor at The Indianapolis Star, Editorial Page Editor of The Baltimore Sun and reporter for The Chicago Sun-Times, among others. Ms. Thomas has also been an Institute of Politics Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, a Visiting Fellow on the Editorial Board of The New York Times and is a past chairman of the National Press Foundation.

Howard Weaver

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and former McClatchy newspapers executive Howard Weaver will speak on how lessons learned in over 40 years of journalism can be applied in these uncertain times.

Weaver was born in Anchorage in 1950 and lived there with brief interruptions for forty-five years. Weaver helped lead the Anchorage Daily News to two Pulitzer Prizes, cofounded the Alaska Advocate, hosted a public television program, and was named one of the forty most influential Alaskans in the first forty years of statehood by an Alaska Public Radio Network survey.

Cheryl W. Thompson

Emmy award-winning journalist Cheryl W. Thompson is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post who has written extensively about government corruption, immigration, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Washington, D.C. police department’s handling of homicide investigations.

Most recently, she tracked guns used to kill more than 500 police officers—including several in Alaska—since 2000. The groundbreaking series examined how the killers, many of them felons, got their firearms.

A Chicago native, Ms. Thompson has a bachelor’s degree in speech communication and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has served as an adjunct professor at the University of Florida, and Georgetown and Howard universities. She was part of a Washington Post team of reporters awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

Preston Gannaway

Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Preston Gannaway has worked as a documentary newspaper photographer for the past 10 years.

Gannaway believes the daily newspaper is an inclusive medium that brings visual storytelling to a diverse audience. She currently works for The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk. In 2008, Gannaway's intimate photo story on the St. Pierre family, Remember Me, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography.

Her work has been honored in numerous other national and international competitions, including Pictures of the Year International's One Week's Work and an award of excellence in Best Multimedia Project. A native of North Carolina, she began her career at the Coalfield Progress in rural southwest Virginia after earning a BA in fine art photography at Virginia Intermont College.

Ceaser M. Williams

Ceaser M. Williams, an award-winning journalist, is a freelance writer, editor and public relations consultant based in Independence, MO, just outside Kansas City.

The Buffalo native started his journalism career in 1969 as a general assignment reporter with the former Buffalo Evening News. Williams worked for the paper 11 years, covering beats that included  minority affairs, city court and economic development. He won Page 1 regional writing awards for columns as a soul music critic and for news not under deadline for a story about a chemical plant's efforts to subvert inspections by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Williams, who holds a cum laude bachelor of arts degree in English from the University of Buffalo, was the first African American to work as an editor at the News.

As a freelance journalist the last seven years, Williams' work has included serving as executive editor of Prudence Magazine: The Voice of Africa, and creating and launching a suburban supplement for The Kansas City Call, an African American niche newspaper. 

Ceaser Williams' story ended suddenly on Dec 21, 2010 when he died of a pulmonary embolism, just three months after his Snedden Lecture.  He is greatly missed.

Joel Sartore

National Geographic Photographer. Besides National Geographic, Sartore has completed assignments for Time, Life, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and several numerous book projects. He has received several awards including an Award of Excellence in the category of Magazine Photographer of the year during the 1992 POY Competition.

Mark Schleifstein

Environment reporter Mark Schleifstein worked for the New Orleans Times-Picayune for more than 20 years and won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Katrina disaster. Mark has also written a book on the disaster: Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms.

David Handschuh

The New York Daily News – Staff Photographer.  NY University Professor of Photojournalism.  Handschuh suffered serious injuries and narrowly escaped with his life while covering the attack on the World Trade Center.  During months of recovery, he helped to develop several programs to document and address long term physical and mental health issues for journalists that may arise from working at Ground Zero and other stressful assignments.

Peggy Simpson

Peggy Simpson was the AP reporter covering John Kennedy’s assassination and is a former Contributing Editor for Ms. Magazine and Women’s e-news.  She is an award-winning Washington political and economic correspondent who helped chronicle the women’s political movement.

Gary Cohn

Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Cohn is a reporter with the Los Angeles Times.  Many of Cohn’s stories have exposed wrongdoing, raised important public policy issues and resulted in significant reforms.  He won the 1998 investigative reporting Pulitzer for a series of articles in the Baltimore Sun that documented the dangers to workers and the environment when old warships are dismantled.

Frank Bass

Frank Bass shared the 1988 Pulitzer for general news reporting for an investigation into the high infant mortality rate in Alabama.  He is now assigned to a Washington-based national investigations team specializing in multimedia stories, and is the author of ‘The Associated Press Guide to Internet Research and Reporting.’

Richard Murphy

Photo Editor, Anchorage Daily News.  His professional honors include being part of the Daily News’s 1989 Pulitzer Prize-winning team, and three-time winner of the Picture of the year, Best Use award.  Murphy’s photography is represented in a variety of personal and museum collections, including at the �鶹ԭ�� Museum of the North. 

Maurice Possley

Maurice Possley has covered local and national aspects of the legal system, including the trial of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, the case against Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, and the murder of JonBenet Ramsey.  Possley was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 and 2001 for work with other Tribune reporters on prosecutorial misconduct and the death penalty.  Their reporting was cited by former Illinois Gov. George Ryan as playing a significant role in his decision to empty Death Row in 2003 by commuting all death sentences in Illinois.

Tom French

Tom French earned his Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for the series “Angels & Demons”, about the murder of three women visiting Florida.  He started his career as a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times and began development of several projects that grew into books.  The first was a newspaper series titled “A Cry in the Night,” an account of a dramatic murder investigation and trial that French turned into a book called “Unanswered Cries.”  A year reporting in a public high school produced the series and book “South of Heaven.”

Julie Sullivan

Julie Sullivan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The Oregonian in Portland, Ore., who started her career at The Frontiersman in Wasilla.  She shared the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with three colleagues at The Oregonian who exposed flaws in the immigration and Naturalization Service.

Eric Nalder

Eric Nalder has won two Pulitzer Prizes.  The first for his coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and his second for an investigative report about a federal Indian housing program.  A reporter for 34 years, he has received numerous state, regional and national journalism awards and has taught interviewing and investigative reporting workshops in five countries.  Nalder now works for the Seattle Post Intelligencer.