We are pleased to share that Columbia Journalism School Master of Arts Program alumna Soumya Shankar ('18 M.A. Politics) is the first person selected for Columbia Journalism School's new Tony Horwitz Reporting Fellowship. Shankar is an independent journalist who lives in New York City and is now a fellow at the Asian Writers' Workshop.
The recently established Fellowship honors Tony Horwitz (1958 - 2019), a 1983 graduate of Columbia Journalism School’s Master of Science Program, who won the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting in 1995 while at The Wall Street Journal, and wrote more than a half dozen books, most of them with a focus on American history. Tony Horwitz Fellowship funds may be used to support reporting, investigation or travel. Story proposals can vary widely, whether investigative, explanatory or other journalistic forms while reflecting the spirit of Horwitz’s work. Graduates of Columbia Journalism School’s degree-granting programs from the past 10 years were eligible to submit proposals.
Since her graduation from Columbia, Soumya Shankar’s work has appeared across print, digital, and radio platforms in the United States, Hong Kong, and India such as Foreign Policy, PRI, The Intercept, The Baffler, South China Morning Post, CS Monitor and Caravan Magazine, among others. She has appeared as a commentator on WBEZ Public Radio in Chicago and other platforms. In the previous academic year, she was an adjunct professor of journalism at Stony Brook University on Long Island.
Shankar was awarded a fellowship at The GroundTruth Project to cover rising authoritarianism in India under Narendra Modi. She won a Foreign Press Association, New York award in 2018 and edits a community magazine focused on Indian Americans.
For the Tony Horwitz Fellowship, she will work on a very ambitious project reporting on the woes of undocumented Indian immigrants in the Americas.
The journalists who served to make the selection from among 25 submitted proposals were Columbia Journalism School professors Nina Alvarez, Howard French and Dale Maharidge, and noted journalists and authors William Cohan and Ken Wells. Cohan and Wells were colleagues of Horwitz at The Wall Street Journal.
Shankar is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School's Master of Arts Program, which uses the world-class resources of Columbia University and New York City to train experienced journalists to go deeper, equipping them with subject-area expertise in one of four concentrations - Arts & Culture, Business & Economics, Politics, and Science - so they can produce ambitious works of journalism that explain complicated issues to the public.
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