Seyma Bayram is the 2022-2023 Reflect America Fellow at NPR, where she is currently reporting for the Climate Desk. Previously, she was a Report for America corps member at the Akron Beacon Journal in Akron, where she developed a new beat covering Akron’s Black and marginalized communities. She has reported on violence against LGBTQ+ communities, abortion access, gun legislation and the 2020 general election, among other topics. With the support of a 2021 grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, she reported on the legacies of redlining and racism in urban planning projects, culminating in a two-part series on the Akron Innerbelt Freeway.
Bayram began her journalism career as a staff reporter for the alt-weekly Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss., where she covered local government and criminal justice. Before entering journalism, she was a high school writing teacher in Brooklyn, N.Y. While based in Istanbul, she worked as editor of the publishing program at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, a European experimental art institution.
Bayram is from the Kurdish region of Turkey and was raised in The Netherlands and upstate New York. She plans to use the Spencer Fellowship to report on school segregation and school district boundaries through the story of one Ohio family.