2014-2015

S. Mitra Kalita is currently  the senior vice president for news, opinion and programming for CNN Digital. Kalita leads the national news desk and efforts to creatively share CNN’s journalism and storytelling across an ever-exploding array of platforms. Prior to this appointment, she served as managing editor at the Los Angeles Times.

Before Kalita’s Spencer Fellowship year, she was the ideas editor at Quartz. She worked previously at The Wall Street Journal, where she oversaw coverage of the Great Recession, launched a local news section for New York City and, most recently, reported on the housing crisis. She also launched Mint, a business paper in New Delhi, and has previously worked for the Washington Post, Newsday and the Associated Press. 

She is the author of three books related to migration and globalization, and speaks seven languages (but only four of them well). She is an adjunct professor of journalism at St. John’s and Columbia universities, and previously served as president of the South Asian Journalists Association. Born in Brooklyn, Mitra was raised in Long Island, Puerto Rico and New Jersey—with regular trips to her grandparents’ villages in Assam, India. She lives (and eats) in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of New York City, along with her artist husband and two daughters. She tweets @mitrakalita and her website is www.mitrakalita.com.

She spent her Spencer Fellowship reporting a book on school choice through the lens of one New York City neighborhood. Her reporting took her to Ferguson, Missouri to examine the aftermath of the police shooting.

More of her work can be read at: http://qz.com/author/smkalita/ and http://mitrakalita.com/articles-page/

Joy Resmovits is currently education editor at The Seattle Times. Prior to that, she worked as education reporter at the Los Angeles Times and The Huffington Post.  Both she and her Spencer Fellow colleague, Mitra Kalita,  took positions at LA Times after their Spencer year together.

Resmovits had been writing about schools ever since she was an undergraduate covering New York City’s public schools for the Columbia Daily Spectator. After graduating cum laude from Barnard College in 2010 with an English major that focused on the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, she wrote for the Wall Street Journal and worked as a Fellow at the Jewish Daily Forward. She has also contributed to the New York Daily News, Education Update and the St. Louis Beacon.

She used her Spencer Fellowship year to assess the state of education for American students with disabilities.

-Published Work
Long-form piece on autism, DCPS, and special ed more broadly

Linda Lutton is an award-winning education reporter at Chicago’s NPR-affiliate station, WBEZ, where she covers major news, issues and debates in education as they play out in Chicago and the suburbs.

Her Spencer-supported project aired at WBEZ radio in 2016. “The View From Room 205” is an hour-long radio documentary in 10 parts about the impact of poverty on Chicago schools, past and present.

Lutton’s enterprise reporting has examined Chicago’s dropout crisis, race and segregation in schools, and school performance. Linda worked on the 2013 This American Life episodes “Harper High School Parts 1 and 2,” which documented life in a school located in a neighborhood racked by violence. The broadcast won the 2014 Peabody Award, Columbia’s duPont Award, among others.

Linda’s radio work has been broadcast on This American Life, NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered, The World and Marketplace. Her print reporting has appeared in the Chicago Reader, In These Times, Education Week, the Chicago Tribune, and others. Her investigation into a corrupt south suburban school superintendent won a national 2005 Education Writers Association grand prize. The year earlier, she won the Studs Terkel Award for reporting on Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods. 

Lutton used her Spencer year creating a one-hour radio documentary examining the intersection of poverty and education through the lens of a high-poverty Chicago elementary school.

Prior to joining WBEZ in 2008, Linda worked for three years as a freelance reporter and radio producer in Michoacán, Mexico and as the lead education reporter at the Daily Southtown, where she covered education issues across 85 school districts in Chicago’s south suburbs.

Linda has a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was born and raised in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. She currently lives in Chicago with her husband, artist-muralist Hector Duarte, and their three children.