Author Biographies

Algren's City Updated's telephone calls to Ashleigh Braggs regarding her bio were not immediately returned.

A cursory Google search revealed that her writing has appeared in that's Beijing, tbjhome, China Development Brief and Odyssey Couleur magazines. Unnamed sources close to Braggs divulged that she fled to China after she allegedly impaled someone who disparaged her hometown, Detroit. An officer at the Beijing public security bureau, who would only give his surname, Li, confirmed that Braggs spent five years blending among the capital's expatriate residents, fortifying her college textbook Mandarin, consorting with representatives of barely legal non-governmental organizations and learning how to talk a bit of trash in French.

The aforementioned unnamed source says, Braggs hopes being accepted to the Academy for Alternative Journalism was a sign that it is finally safe to come back home.

Bradley Campbell was the acting assistant editor for FINDER magazine, Willamette Week’s annual guide to Portland, Oregon. He started at the paper as an intern. He grew up outside the rural town of Dallas, Oregon. His parents were teachers and own 11 acres of forest. They both retired this year. His older sister is a smarty-pants consumer protection lawyer in Dallas, Texas. She just bought a Subaru outback station wagon. Bradley attended Pacific Lutheran University in Parkland, Washington. He majored in Writing, with an emphasis in Post-Colonial Literature of the Caribbean. The degree enabled him to get jobs driving ski vans in Colorado and salvaging trees in Eastern Washington. But it also let him travel to Trinidad and Tobago, drink rum and play fancy sailor during Carnival. He got his teaching certification in ESL from UC Irvine Extension. He’s able to explain to non-native English speakers the difference between doing a bed and making one. Before and during his tenure at Willamette Week, he worked as a K-12 substitute teacher for the Portland Public School District. He has wonderful classroom management skills. Bradley was the captain of his high school football team. But now he wears women’s jeans and enjoys the music of Laura Gibson and Air. He is a registered Maine sea kayak guide and is afraid of the ocean. One day, he would like to bicycle across Ireland. He enjoys reading Michael Chabon, Tony Earley and Amanda Davis. And he never doubted the intentions of Severus Snape.

Caleb Hannan's first muse was a Maaco pitchman with a Prince Valiant haircut. When disgraced baseball legend Pete Rose released a memoir admitting to the gambling charges he'd denied for decades, Hannan wrote an angry op-ed to his college paper. That one byline was all it took. Hannan was hooked.                 
 
Before becoming an AAJ fellow, Hannan worked at U.S. News & World Report as a researcher with the Almanac of American Politics, and as an intern and fact-checker for The Washingtonian magazine. He has freelanced with publications big and small, writing about outdoor sculpture for the Arlington Connection to interviewing Tiger Woods’ surgeon for Golf Magazine.

Although focused on a career in writing, Hannan prides himself on the variety of jobs he held as a teenager and post-grad. He's sold knives and timeshares and breast pumps, rented cars, made burritos and served drinks. One summer, while working at a neighborhood pharmacy, he even fit dozens of elderly women with prescription-strength compression stockings.

 (Editor's note: There are three things you need to know about compression stockings. They have to be tight. It requires a lot of force to put them on. And finally, you almost never get the right fit the first time.)

Hannan is grateful to the AAJ for debunking every myth he had about good writers, namely that they're born not made. He is excited to find a new challenge and eager to learn all he can about what it takes to write a good story.

Ciara Sampaio is an artist, poet and freelance journalist. She began writing at an early age, penning fantastical stories that flowed from her wild imagination. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Global Studies from the University of Washington-Tacoma in 2006, where she served as a contributing writer to The Ledger, the student newspaper. Since college, she has indulged in her passion for traveling and writing about
her experiences. Her work explores trends in visual art and film. Her
favorite authors include Jack Kerouac, Chuck Palahniuk, and Hunter S.
Thompson.  Ciara juggles her love of writing with extensive backpacking
trips, glass blowing and poi spinning.

Emily Withrow's realization that normal stuff makes great fodder for stories dates to fourth grade. She read The Relatives Came, on which she not-so-loosely based a poem about her own crazy kin. Celebrated for its ridiculous snoring images, the masterpiece was an elementary school hit; she's been seeking attention through writing ever since.

While reporting stories, Emily has traveled through remote cow pastures in France to track down a mother of donor-egg triplets, gone undercover to a yoga studio to purchase a pair of vibrating plastic brains, and read every single murder-related newspaper clipping from Chicago between 2000 and 2005. She loves her job.

Emily holds several scholarly degrees of varying usefulness: bachelor’s. and master’s degrees. in French Literature from Bryn Mawr College (ask her about how inter-textual dialogues shape identity theory in the Antilles), and an master’s degree in Journalism from Northwestern University. She has done work for The Associated Press, CBS2 Chicago, and The Onion A.V. Club, among others. She divides her free time evenly among eating cheese, rock climbing, and making fun of her stupid cats. If only one dream comes true in her lifetime, she hopes it's the one where she gets to look in her old age like Brassai's "Bijou." Then she will die happy, laughing.

Gus Garcia-Roberts was born in Philadelphia and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexica and New York City.  He attended Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, home of the largest RV dealership in the world.  He wrote about community politics for Gothamgazette.com in 2005, and about New York baseball for the Epoch Times in 2006.  For the latter, he watched Carlos Beltran strike out in Shea Stadium to end the Mets’ season, discovered that he become one of those sad sacks you see moping in the bleachers an hour after a game ends.  He blamed cold wind for the tears streaming out of his eyes.  He spent the summer as an AAJ fellow  playing chess in the sun and traveling with wrestling dwarves, both activities that can leave you light-headed and disoriented. 

Kelly Virella grew up in a mobile home in an all-black, rural Alabama town so small and poor it couldn't get a Wal-Mart. Freed slaves taught her grandmother and great aunt ebonics and the art of storytelling. They, in turn, taught Kelly. At 18, she left her river valley community to attend Princeton University and make dead-white-men worldwide roll over in their graves. Soon after college, she began exposing the starch-collared world of journalism to her playful irreverence. She has discombobulated editors at AlterNet, where she worked as an associate editor, and at the St. Petersburg Times, where she worked as a one-year intern. She believes that when all else fails, you should laugh.

Natalie Collier is, without question, the most important writer to emerge from Starkville, Mississippi in the last 40 years. (Her audience far surpasses that of the guy who self-publishes limericks.) After graduating from Millsaps College, a small liberal arts college in Jackson, Mississippi, Natalie stayed in the state’s capital to work on a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy at a conservative seminary. Being un-conservative, she left the program a semester before she was converted (i.e. graduated) and decided to take a risk: the life of a writer.

She cultivated her writing and editing skills while working at the Jackson Free Press, the state’s only alternative newspaper. As an assistant editor at the JFP, she directed the arts and entertainment and “Chickdom” sections of the paper. She helped devise the editorial strategy of the paper, managed interns and assigned and edited stories.

Though she isn’t sure where life will take her after Jackson and the AAJ., she is excited about the future. But where ever she goes, she’ll bring her chutzpah, Southern charm, her “I love Black People” T-shirt and a steamer trunk full of shoes. There’s no way she can lose.

Suemedha Sood joined the Academy for Alternative Journalism from Arlington, VA. Before coming to Chicago, she was an assistant editor at the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington, D.C. She has worked for a number of  publications, including AlterNet, Wiretap Magazine, Iris Magazine, and the Human Rights Campaign's Equality Magazine. She has covered everything from social justice to arts, and culture. She graduated from the University of Virginia in 2006 with a double bachelor’s degree in foreign affairs and religious studies. She enjoys cooking, traveling, being outdoors, talking to strangers, taking digital pictures at inappropriate times, and reading on the beach.

Before joining the AAJ class of 2007, Yasmin Khan spent two years whizzing around Bolivia working with street children, teaching English and sending slews of pitches to the wrong editors, She is now ready to settle down in the states and write slews of stories for the right editors.

In 2003, Yasmin earned a degree in print journalism from The University of New Mexico, where she also studied photojournalism. Shortly after graduation, she became the immigration, higher education and culture reporter for The Santa Fe New Mexican and an arts writer for Pasatiempo magazine.  She also wrote for La Voz, The New Mexican’s Spanish language publication, and covered youth culture for Santa Fe’s U Mag, which published her blog, in which she detailed  her travels through Europe with a South American rock band.

Yasmin broke away from her cubicle in 2004 to study the drug war in Bolivia.  Within that 10-day Narco News fellowship, she chewed a lot of coca, wrote about supposed narco-terrorists, and fell (hard) for a Bolivian rock ‘n roll drummer.  After one more year at The New Mexican, she returned to La Paz, became Bolivian by marriage and started a new life at 12,000 feet. She is ready to dive back in to reporting in the U.S.

Born and bred in Chicago to Indian-Italian-Belgian-French parents, Yasmin has wandering in her blood and isn’t afraid to drag her unbelievably patient husband anywhere for the right job. She is looking for a publication where she can use her Spanish and write both hard news and long-length feature stories.