About

The word jina means "name" in Swahili and "the overcomer" in Sanskrit.  What a spectrum.

I cover human rights, Africa and foreign affairs.  I also like to write quirky features and character-and-place- rich narratives.

As is the freelance way, I'm a lot of things: features editor of Makeshift Magazine, a quarterly about creativity in informal economies; editor of Dart Society Reports, an online magazine of human rights coverage; and a regular print and multimedia correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor.  I also collaborate often with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. At the moment, I am also a visiting scholar with New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, as the 2011 Reporting Award winner.

My work has also appeared in Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Walrus (Canada), Glamour Magazine, Harvard Magazine, Congressional Quarterly Press, and Best American Science Writing.  I've worked at Harper's Magazine, and I've also published in the online versions of Mother Jones, Foreign Policy and the Global Post.  

I've been a Fulbright Fellow in Journalism, an Ochberg Fellow of the Dart Center on Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University, and a Pulitzer Center journalist-in-residence at the College of William and Mary. In 2011, I received the Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize Gold Medal.

Prior to this full-time journalism thing, I helped edit "Telling True Stories," a handy how-to resource for narrative nonfiction writers put out by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, where I also helped shape and organize several of the Nieman Conferences on Narrative Journalism.

I've been able to do all of this because of help from countless people and several institutions. I am indebted, literally and figuratively, to Boston University, the Harry S Truman Foundation, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Fulbright Commission and its related architecture, and the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.