Hometown: Washington DC

Current Location: Chicago, IL

Can you tell us a bit about your background and what inspired you to pursue your current career path?

I I grew up in Washington D.C. with parents that read to me and the Washington Post on the kitchen table every morning. My earliest news memory is of reading a story about a heroin ring at a high school in Fairfax Couny, VA. I was eight or nine and remember standing at the kitchen counter in the grips of the story. I was an enthusiastic correspondent for my elementary classroom newspapers and later found a lot of purpose and drive in volunteering for and leading my high school paper. For better or worse, I am a hard-charging, chronically inquisitive person with a strong moral sense and have found an outlet for all of that in news environments.

Who or what has been your biggest influence or mentor in your journey?

I don't know how to answer this question. I've been lucky to learn from many talented reporters and editors over a short career.

Stacy St. Clair and PAR alum Christy Gutowski are powerful voices of reason and ethics on every story I've brought them.

Ray Long, also a PAR alum, has reminded me since day one to be obsessed and to drive the beat, not let the beat drive me.

What are your goals and aspirations for the future?

Five years from now, I hope I'm writing incisive stories about real people that make readers see their city, their leaders and their neighbors in a different way. I hope the work I do is focused on power and accountability, but also that it makes the despair and compassion and tension that run through this city more immediate to any person who picks up the paper or clicks on a headline. No matter what I am covering, I hope to be a trusted source of information in that area.

What advice would you give to others who are looking to advance and make a difference in their field?

Paraphrasing the writer Joan Didion, I would say that to live in the world and to see it as it is are difficult tasks. Doing so — going into a situation with no assumptions and open, hungry eyes — is worthwhile. I would also say that success doesn't happen without taking risks and that to grow is to be uncomfortable. You want to be hitting the limits of your skills and trying to expand those limits all the time.

What do you enjoy doing in your free time that helps you stay inspired and motivated?

I try to get out into different parts of the city where I haven't been yet. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods and it's easy, despite how big it is, to find yourself wearing the same paths. Steelworkers' Park down in East Side, a white-painted church in Little Village and the Belmont steps up in Lakeview are all within city limits and yet you couldn't come up with three more different places. The sheer scale of this city and all the stories in it that I haven't yet found both motivates and terrifies me.

I'm interested in the idea that language runs out at some point in an attempt to articulate experience and we have to use other things to express ourselves, so I also listen to a lot of music and pay close attention to dance. And I love to move: climb things, run, explore places that might appear off limits or inaccessible.