North Carolina Voices: Understanding Poverty brings together an accomplished and diverse group of journalists.  The reporting and producing staff includes members of WUNC's award winning news and programming team, plus independent producers from around the southeast.  The editing staff includes some of the top radio editors in the country.  Among them they have dozens of years of experience on national radio programs and projects like Morning Edition , Marketplace, Latino USA , Radio Diaries and American RadioWorks.  

Project Staff

Project Director:   Emily Hanford is a Senior Editor at WUNC where she oversees special projects. Before becoming Senior Editor, Emily was News Director for five years. During her tenure, WUNC won an "Overall Excellence" award from the Radio-Television News Directors' Association (RTNDA) and dozens of other awards from regional and national journalism associations.  As News Director, Emily oversaw a major expansion in the news department and helped move the station to an all news and information format.  Emily developed several award winning projects and series including the annual series North Carolina Voices .   The series has won awards from the Associated Press, Public Radio News Directors Incorporated (PRNDI), the Foundation of American Women in Radio and Television and the Society of Professional Journalists.  Before coming to Chapel Hill, Emily worked as a reporter and producer for the award winning series Chicago Matters at Chicago Public Radio, WBEZ.  She was also a news host, producer, general assignment reporter and acting News Director at WBEZ.   Emily began her career in public radio at WFCR in Amherst, MA.  She has a degree in English and American Studies from Amherst College.

Research Assistant: Anthony Hayes is currently a graduate student at Duke University. He holds degrees from NCSU and The London Film School where he studied documentary filmmaking. He is a native of Raleigh.

Producers:

Billy Barnes (photographer) Billy Barnes was working in Atlanta as a writer and photographer for McGraw-Hill magazines when he returned to his home state in 1964 to join the staff of the North Carolina Fund. For the next five years, he was involved in the production of publications, films, and radio for the Fund. But he says his most memorable days were those spent roaming the state with camera in hand. From 1964 to 1969 he made more than 40,000 black and white photographs that eloquently document an era of social change in this century.
When the Fund closed its doors in 1969, Barnes pursued his dream of doing freelance work. Since then his photography has appeared in hundreds of publications including Time, Fortune, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, the New York Times Magazine, USA Today Weekend, Woman's Day, Working Woman and Delta Airlines's Sky Magazine. His photographs appear in books by more than 120 publishers. Permanent collections of Barnes' 1960s documentary work rest in the photography archives of both the U.S. Library of Congress, and the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill.
In 1992, Barnes ventured into broadcasting. On a free-lance basis he has produced 75 human-interest features for UNC-TV on North Carolina people and places. Asked about his life-and-work philosophy, Barnes says: "Few of us are called to do great things. Instead, we're called to do small things with great love."

Paul Cuadros is an award-winning investigative reporter with more than 10 years of experience. A graduate of the University of Michigan and Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, he has focused his career in journalism writing and reporting on issues of race and poverty. He has worked for the award-winning investigative journal The Chicago Reporter writing about the poor on such issues as health care, immigration, housing, and crime. After working for the Reporter for five years, he moved to Washington, D.C. and worked for the Center for Public Integrity, serving as a writer and researcher on two book projects and several reports for the Center. In 1999, he was awarded an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship to write and report on the impact of emerging Latino communities on the rural South. He is currently a freelance writer for Time magazine and working on a book about Latinos in the South. He is the recipient of the Inland Press Association Award sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Pew Charitable Trust Award for health care reporting, and most recently the National Association of Hispanic Journalist award for on-line reporting. 

Dawn Dreyer is the Learning Outreach Director at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University. Her responsibilities include continuing studies courses and the Certificate in Documentary Studies, documentary institutes and workshops, and visiting documentary artist and lecture programs. She also teaches the Seminar in Documentary Studies. Dawn directs the Center's annual Documentary Happening, a three-day festival that brings together student and community documentary artists for screenings, listening sessions, and community dialogue. She also facilitates the "Fresh Docs: Works in Progress" screenings, a monthly venue for documentary artists to share their work and receive support and constructive feedback. In addition to her work at CDS, Dawn is the board president of the Southern Documentary Fund. She is a published writer and writing teacher. In 2002, she exhibited her photographs "Portraits of Broadway and Church" as part of the exhibition September 11 Remembered at the Durham Arts Council. Dawn received her undergraduate degree in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her MA in Rhetoric and Composition from Florida State University. 

Leda Hartman is an independent radio producer with 20 years of experience in journalism. Her radio features and news reports are heard regularly on WUNC, NPR's Morning Edition , All Things Considered , Latino USA and Living on Earth , as well as the public radio programs Marketplace and The World . Leda is also frequently heard internationally on the Voice of America. She has produced long-form radio documentaries under the auspices of the World Bank Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) at the University of North Carolina. She has also conducted numerous oral history interviews for the SOHP. She has worked on projects with both the North Carolina Humanities Council and the North Carolina Arts Council. Leda has received several regional and national awards, including two shared Peabody Awards and one shared Gracie Award. She holds a B.A. in American Studies from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. 

Sara Field Gronewold (Web Producer) is a producer of multi-media and web-based journalism. She was on the initial staff which created a web presence for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News in 1995. While living in Philadelphia, Sara competed on the United States National Rowing team, and earned a World Championship title. She returned to web production as a new-media producer for the NPR affiliate; WBUR-FM, where she maintained the web site for The Connection, and produced web documentaries. She is now a freelance web producer, and lives in Durham, NC.

Leoneda Inge is WUNC's "Changing Economy" reporter. During her three years in North Carolina, she has produced radio reports on many of the state's hardest hit industries: tobacco, textiles, and technology. Leoneda won a 2003 Gracie Award from the Foundation of American Women in Radio and Television. Her winning entry "Out of Work: Mary Moore" focused on an out of work human resources professional and how she and her family were coping with the economy's downturn. Leoneda began her professional reporting career in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and later worked as a journalist in Milwaukee. Leoneda holds a B.S. in Journalism from Florida A&M University. In 1995, she was named a University of Michigan Journalism Fellow. She is a frequent contributor to NPR's Tavis Smiley Show.  

Rusty Jacobs is an award winning reporter for WUNC.  He has covered politics, government, law, the changing economy, the military and more.  His work has been recognized by the North Carolina Associated Press, the Radio-Television News Directors' Association and the Society of Professional Journalists.  Rusty is also a substitute host for WUNC's midday program The State of Things . Prior to relocating from New York City, Rusty was Managing Editor with Securities Week , a brokerage industry publication. Before that he covered three towns for The Litchfield County Times , in northwestern Connecticut.  

Michelle Johnson is an editor for the Winston Salem Journal in Winston-Salem, N.C. She has worked as a reporter, producer and news director at public and community radio stations in the Midwest and North Carolina.  Michelle is the recipient of numerous awards for her reporting on higher education and for her work on multimedia projects for Journalnow , the Web site of the Winston-Salem Journal. 

Alison Jones is an experienced journalist with a rich understanding of North Carolina. Alison grew up in the state, and graduated from Yale University with a degree in history. She worked for six years as a staff writer at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., where she covered education, worked as a general assignment reporter and created the paper's first beat devoted to children's issues. She has worked as a stringer for Time magazine and Money magazine. Her stories have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Washington Post , The Baltimore Sun and The Bulletin , a Belgian newsweekly. Alison has studied radio journalism with John Biewen of American RadioWorks at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies.  Her piece on upheaval within the United Church of Christ aired on WUNC in October, 2003. Alison lives in Durham, N.C. where she works as a free-lance journalist.  

Jessica Jones has a decade of reporting experience. Currently, she is a reporter at WUNC focusing primarily on education issues. She has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the North Carolina Association of Educators, and the North Carolina Associated Press. Jessica is a graduate of Yale University and was a Fulbright Scholar to Syria. Jessica has covered the plight of Mayan and Liberian refugees in the American South, Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt, and the "No Child Left Behind Act." She is a frequent contributor to NPR's newsmagazines and The World (WGBH). 

Susan Leffler is an independent radio producer living near Charleston, West Virginia.  She was one of two reporters who worked on a series called "Welfare As They Know It:  A Year Of Change for Josephine Moore And Michelle Giscombe" for Marketplace in 1997 and 1998. The series won a first place EMMAS award from the National Women's Political Caucus.  She also worked as the Special Projects Producer for the ten-station West Virginia Public Radio Network for nearly a decade. Her work included producing a year long Sound Partners for Community Health Radio Project (funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Benton Foundation) looking at welfare reform's effect on people's access to health care.  She was awarded a Kaiser/National Press Foundation Media Mini-Fellowship in Health to report on welfare reform and access to health care for the working poor in West Virginia in 1999. Her series "Our Daily Bread:  The Changing Nature of Work" won a West Virginia Associated Press Broadcasters Association first place award.  From 1984 to 1989, Leffler lived and worked in Central America reporting for NPR, Monitor Radio, the BBC and the CBC.  

Laura Leslie is the Capitol reporter at WUNC, where she covers state politics and government.  She came to WUNC from California, where she was assistant editor at the national show Weekend America .  Prior to that, Laura was a Capitol reporter at KXJZ in Sacramento, where her team won an award from the California Associated Press for coverage of the California recall.  She has also done freelance work for NPR and Reuters, and worked for KQED and the California Foundation as a community health reporter, producing stories on low-income health issues such as child obesity and water quality.  Before moving into journalism, Laura spent several years in social services, managing a runaway shelter and working with at-risk youth and their families.  She holds an MA in English from Indiana University.  

Rebecca Moon is a student at the Center for Documentary Studies. Her first love has become audio documentaries. She has been a writer and women's health practitioner for many years.  

Amy Nelson is an award-winning independent radio producer with more than eight years of experience. As a host and reporter for WUNC, she covered a wide range of subjects from the changing economy to arts and culture. Her work has been recognized by the Radio Television News Directors Association, American Women in Radio & Television, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Associated Press. She holds a degree in English from Oberlin College.

Paul Overton is an independent producer living in Durham, North Carolina.  His work has aired on WZBC in Boston, KVNF in Colorado, and KUOW in Seattle.  In addition to producing radio pieces, Paul and his girlfriend Sharon Ashe have been teaching and performing Lindy Hop around the globe for nearly a decade. In that time, they have built an extremely successful swing dance program based on their unique and effective style of teaching.

James Todd reports print, audio and video stories for Duke University's Office of News and Communications. He also does freelance reporting and producing for public radio; his radio reports and commentaries have aired on NPR shows, as well as local affiliate WUNC. He worked for a year producing segments on WUNC's program The State of Things .  

Editors:

Sharon Ball is an editorial consultant and independent news and feature editor, specializing in public radio.  She is the former senior editor of the NPR News Cultural Desk in Washington, D.C., where she established the network's first, formal religion, media and race relations "beats" and raised the editorial profile of arts journalism.  At NPR News, the many series and documentary projects she developed and edited include "The Other History" by Edward Ball (no relation), which led to Ball's book Slaves in the Family , winner of the 1998 National Book Award for Non-Fiction.   Among Ball's recent clients and independent projects are the NPR program On the Media ; "Alice and Zora" for the NPR Morning Edition series "Intersections"; and "The Color of Night" for Chicago Public Radio's documentary series Chicago Matters . During 25 years in public and commercial radio, Ball was a newscaster, news producer, fill-in host, senior administrator and essayist. Her awards and honors include Sigma Delta Chi and Gabriel Awards, a Case Media Fellowship at Harvard University Divinity School, and a John Fetzer Institute Senior Scholarship.  Her media appearances include moderating the panel discussion "The Future of Diversity in Media" broadcast live on C-Span.   She has lived and worked in Japan and Taiwan, trained in group facilitation and studied speech and English at Ohio University and George Mason University.    

John Biewen is a Correspondent-Producer for American RadioWorks , the national documentary unit of American Public Media.  John has produced a large body of work on economic and social issues, as well as investigative reports and historical documentaries. He is based at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. In 1997-98, John covered the Rocky Mountain West as a staff reporter for NPR. His reporting has won numerous honors, including the Robert F. Kennedy (2000, 2001), Society of Professional Journalists (Sigma Delta Chi), Edward R. Murrow (RTNDA) and (American Bar Association) Silver Gavel Awards. John graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota with a degree in Philosophy. From 1985-1987 he lived and taught in Osaka, Japan.  

Cheryl Devall is program manager for an emerging think tank, the Center for the Study of Journalism and Democracy at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. Before she arrived at Annenberg in July 2004, Devall was a senior editor at Marketplace , public radio's daily economics show based in Los Angeles. She's a former Los Angeles correspondent for the San Jose (CA) Mercury-News . Other stops during her newspaper career included the Chicago Tribune , the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Boston Globe .  For 11 years, Devall was a correspondent for NPR, based in Chicago and Miami. While at NPR, she was part of a team awarded the Alfred I. DuPont Silver Baton, first place from the National Association of Black Journalists and an Ohio State Award for "AIDS in Black America: Breaking the Silence." Devall was a John S. and James L. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 1995-1996. She holds a Bachelor's degree in sociology from Radcliffe College of Harvard University and a Master's degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.  

Neenah Ellis is a veteran documentary producer, writer and editor.  She has been a producer and writer for NPR's All Things Considered and numerous other NPR news and cultural programs. Her free-lance work has included films for the National Park Service and The Discovery Channel, a ten-year long oral history project for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and a New York Times best-selling book entitled, "If I Live to be 100 - Lessons from the Centenarians." She is a member of the Association of Independents in Radio and serves as an AIR mentor to new producers.  She is the recipient of two radio production grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and her work has won three George Foster Peabody Awards, the Radio-Television News Directors' Edward R. Murrow Award, and the Alfred I. DuPont - Columbia University Award.   

Deb George is an award-winning independent producer, editor, and reporter. Her career has taken her to Asia, Africa and South America where she covered the Rwandan genocide and the war in Sierra Leone; the politics of biotechnology and the AIDS epidemic. She was with National Public Radio for 15 years, as producer of Weekend Edition Sunday and an editor and producer on the National, Foreign, and Cultural Desks. She also produced a number of special series for NPR's news magazines and was the networks' first liaison for independent producers. George was the senior editor of American RadioWorks, producing documentaries and investigative reports for public radio. Since 1996, she's edited the RadioDiaries series with producer Joe Richman. Her work has received numerous awards including the duPont Columbia Gold and Silver Batons; the Robert F. Kennedy Award; the Edward R. Murrow (RTNDA) Award and the Casey Award for reporting on children.

Maria Martin has more than 20 years experience working in Latino public broadcasting. She has worked for a number of networks, including NPR, where she was an editor on the National Desk. She is the founding producer of LatinoUSA , an NPR program heard on over 250 stations-- the only English-language broadcast vehicle regularly covering the country's Latinos, as well as Latin America. Martin recently left LatinoUSA to start her own production and training company, GraciasVida Productions . GraciasVida was recently awarded a major grant by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to produce a twenty-six part series, in English and Spanish: "Despues de Las Guerras: Central America After the Wars."   Before joining NPR, Martin was the editor and host of the Latin American News Service (LANS), a seven-minute daily modular service of Latin American affairs. She holds a Masters degree in journalism from Ohio State University, and recently completed Fulbright and Knight International Press Fellowships working with indigenous radio journalists in Guatemala. She has also conducted journalism and radio broadcast training in Uruguay and Bolivia. Martin has won over two dozen awards for her reporting and commitment to covering Latino and Latin American issues. 

Marcus Rosenbaum is a senior editor at National Public Radio. He currently maintains a number of editing duties. Marcus has worked off and on at NPR for more than 20 years. Among his many assignments, he has been senior editor of a public opinion polling project, executive producer of Talk of the Nation, senior editor of the National Desk, senior editor of All Things Considered, and he was the network's first foreign editor. He also was the lead editor of "Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Radio Journalism and Production." His work has won numerous awards, including two duPont-Columbia Awards, an Angel Award, a Public Radio Program Award, a National Press Club award for consumer journalism, and was runner-up in 2003 for the National Council on Public Polls' Excellence in Media Coverage of Polls Award. 

Ben Shapiro is a radio and television producer whose wide-ranging documentary work over the past 20 years has aired on many NPR programs, CBC and other outlets.  He is currently finishing a documentary on photographer Gregory Crewdson. Ben is editor of Joe Richman's Radio Diaries and mixed the recent Mandela: An Audio History , and was editor of The Next Big Thing during 2002-2004. His programs have won many awards including Third Coast, NFCB Gold and Silver Reels, and three Emmys. Ben is the producer of the 2003 and 2004 Third Coast Festival Broadcasts.

"The State of Things" Staff:

Susan Davis is Senior Producer of The State of Things .   She came to WUNC from Washington, DC where she worked as a producer and editor at NPR.   Susan was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan.   She's a graduate of Reed College in Portland, Oregon and has an MFA in poetry from the Writing Programs at the University of Houston. Her radio career began in the early 1990s as a production assistant at Marketplace . She went on to produce and manage the documentary series Soundprint and to produce and edit for NPR's All Things Considered , Talk of the Nation , and the National Desk at NPR.   She's independently produced over a dozen radio documentaries and pieces. Her commentaries have been heard on All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation .   She's also taught creative Writing at West Virginia University. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals including The Paris Review , Antioch Review , the Boston Review , Western Humanities Review, Witness and Nimrod .

Dave DeWitt is Senior Editor of The State of Things . After graduating from Denison University, he embarked on a meandering work history that has included five years as a college basketball coach, three years in college admissions, and three seasons as a broadcaster for the Tar Heel Sports Network. He has also freelanced for The New York Times and several magazines, served as the Editor-In-Chief of Basketball America magazine, and written a non-fiction book titled "True Blue" (Rowman & Littlefield/2002).

Jordana Gustafson began to freelance regularly for WUNC and The State of Things in June 2004. She was born and raised in California, educated in Connecticut (Connecticut College), and apprenticed in radio at WBUR-Boston, where she worked most recently as a producer for Here and Now. She has freelanced for WBEZ-Chicago's This American Life, WNYC's The Next Big Thing and has reported for WRNI-Providence, and the Boston Globe and Boston Herald newspapers. Jordana has traveled on four continents and has studied in Sweden, Vietnam, and Mexico.

Melinda Penkava has been host of The State of Things since 2003. Serving as host marks her return to WUNC, where she worked as a reporter from 1991-1993. For the past decade, she served as a newscaster and talk show host at NPR, including regular appearances as host of Talk of the Nation . Melinda is a native of New Haven, Connecticut.   She moved to the Triangle in 1984 to work at WCHL Radio. She later worked for radio stations WDNC, WRAL-FM, and WPTF prior to joining WUNC.

Cori Princell joined the production staff of The State of Things in July 2003. A native of Colorado, she attended Brown University and graduated in 2001 with a major in American Civilization. As a sophomore in college, she studied abroad in Cameroon, and did an independent study on the lives of women in a Muslim village. Her honors thesis was an oral history of a radical Catholic community in Providence, RI. After graduating, she traveled in Spain, worked at a diner in New Jersey, and volunteered at a farm in Massachusetts.   She spent a year working for a documentary film company in New York City before coming to work at WUNC. Her other experience in public radio includes creating and hosting 'The Community Radio Show' on Brown Student Radio, and helping to produce 'One Union Station,' a daily state-wide talk show on WRNI.

Fred Wasser is Executive Producer of Talk Programming at WUNC.   Fred is a 27-year veteran of public radio. He has been at WUNC since August 2002 where he oversees the daily talk program, The State of Things and other original content.   For 13 years, Fred produced features and interviews at NPR's Morning Edition , Weekend Edition/Sunday and Weekend All Things Considered .   In the 1980s, Fred was a Broadcast Technician -- and then a staff Producer -- for Minnesota Public Radio's A Prairie Home Companion .   Fred has also worked at WETA-FM in Washington, DC and Vermont Public Radio. He's a graduate of Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont.

Keith Weston is Director of The State of Things and a Host of WUNC's program Back Porch Music.   Since joining the WUNC staff in 1990, Keith has been Music Director and classical music announcer, and the station's first webmaster. From classic rock jock to country music host, Keith has held several DJ jobs at AM & FM stations across the state. Keith has lived in North Carolina all his life. He graduated from UNC-CH in 1984 with degrees in English and Philosophy.

Poll Analysis:

Dr. Tim Vercellotti, Elon University
Tim Vercellotti is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Elon University. He also is director of the Elon University Poll, a statewide public opinion survey conducted six times per year through Elon's Center for Public Opinion Polling. The center, using 40 computer-assisted telephone interviewing stations, surveys adult residents of North Carolina about politics and public policy issues. Vercellotti, who earned a doctorate in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaches courses in public opinion polling, political behavior and American politics. He also conducts research on media and politics, voting behavior and political psychology.

Music:

Christopher "Langston Fuze" Rowland is a poet, writer, MC, spoken word artist, songwriter and arranger, screenwriter, public speaker, actor, and visual artist. L-Fuze's stage name is derived from the great Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. L–Fuze's first three albums (The Poetic / 2000 * Inkwell Skripturez /2001 * LYRITOGRAPHY / 2002) are a meshing of poetry, spoken word rhythms, and rap lyricism. In 2003, Fuze was awarded the United Arts Council Literature Grant for his first book of poetry and social commentaries "Plasma Succotash." He is also the author of: "To Be The Sun," "A Ghetto Story," "The Poetic Biography Of Langston Lyricai Fuze," and the recently released "Real Men Have Love Handles." L–Fuze teaches Hip-Hop culture and expression.   He has a firm appreciation for break dancing, and as a rapping recording artist, he continues to promote the true meaning of the art form through workshops and live demonstrations. Keeping in the tradition of original Hip–Hop graffiti, L–Fuze has also used his visual art talents to create his album and book covers, as well as the design concepts highlighting logos, flyers, and other promotional materials. L–Fuze is a graduate of East Carolina University. His website is www.lfuze.com

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Support for North Carolina Voices: Understanding Poverty comes from the A.J. Fletcher Foundation, the Center for Documentary Studies, Doug and Peggy Abrams, the Julian Price Family Foundation, Maupin Taylor P.A., the Michael and Laura Brader-Araje Foundation, and the North Carolina Humanities Council.