I’m a writer, editor, producer, and scholar with a new book: OTHER PEOPLE’S WORDS: FRIENDSHIP, LOSS, AND THE CONVERSATIONS THAT NEVER END (Spiegel & Grau, 2024). While the book is more personal than anything I’ve written before, its driving questions have captivated me for as long as I can remember: how we love and learn, lose and find one another through language, and how our words can both serve and betray us when we need them the most.

My career began for real when I was about to get my PhD at Stanford and was offered a tenure-track job. This was supposed to be the dream! But I turned it down to join a nonprofit newsroom instead. I’d already been working with YOUTH RADIO, NPR’s youth desk. It was so fulfilling, why would I stop? We went on to win Peabody, Murrow, Kennedy, Third Coast, and a slew of other journalism awards. Our investigations advanced reforms in criminal justice and child welfare. I launched YR’s science and mental health desks, established the first youth coding program in a US newsroom, and partnered with universities to create the organization’s research division. I write articles, books, and talks on youth civic life in digital times. For many years, this part of my work was supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network and major funding from NSF.

In 2020, I became senior editor for audio at the VOX MEDIA PODCAST NETWORK, where I’ve collaborated with brilliant hosts and producers on all sorts of award-winning shows, including Land of the Giants, Little America, Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara, Today Explained, Hell or High Water, On with Kara Swisher, and New York magazine’s Tabloid. A speaker series that I started features some of the biggest imaginations in audio storytelling. I run workshops like The Thrill, Risk, and Power of the Contentious Interview; Cold Opens, Cool Transitions, Killer Endings; and Delivering the Narrative—From Topic to Story. 

I’m editorial lead on Vox Media’s LANGUAGE, PLEASE, a suite of free tools offering style guidance for journalists and storytellers of all kinds who are looking to thoughtfully cover evolving social, cultural, and identity-related issues. Instead of a one-size-fits-all set of edicts, we provide nuanced context on hundreds of terms so that creators can make their own language choices for coverage that’s precise, accurate, and moving, and so that more communities are seen, heard, and respected,

My newest project is a work-in-progress. Combining audio and the written word, BONUS CHAPTER  brings excerpts of nonfiction books to life with voice, score, and sound. The project reimagines text-on-the-page by smuggling the best elements of a narrative podcast episode into the listening experience. A Bonus Chapter can be embedded inside a classic, full-length audiobook or work as a stand-alone trailer that’s shareable outside marketplace paywalls. For our first pilot, we worked with the writer Leila Nadir. “Collaborating with you all awakened my awareness to a layer of experience —  like a sonic ecosystem within my writing — that I hadn’t imagined before,” Leila told me. I’m exploring ways to make more!