Ms. Julie Reynolds (2012-2013)

Julie Reynolds reports on criminal justice and youth violence at The Monterey County Herald. Her   writing has been published or broadcast in The Nation, MotherJones.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, PBS and other outlets.

Recently, she was a Three Strikes Reporting Fellow for John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Before that, she was a class of 2011 Steinbeck Fellow at San José State University specializing in creative nonfiction, and a Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard University, class of 2009.

She was a Justice Reporting Fellow at the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC Annenberg in 2007, studying the impacts of life sentences in California prisons. Her reporting on that topic earned the PASS Award from the National Center on Crime and Delinquency.

Reynolds co-wrote and co-produced the PBS documentary “Nuestra Familia, Our Family,” which among other awards earned Investigative Reporters and Editors’ highest honor, the Tom Renner Medal for Reporting on Organized Crime.

She was editor of the national Latino literary magazine El Andar from 1998 to 2002, and is currently completing a literary nonfiction book about rural California gangs.

                     

Ms. Amy Schwartzott (2011-2012)

Amy Schwartzott is a Ph.D. candidate in African art history at the University of Florida where she holds an Alumni Fellowship.  She received her B.A. from Drew University and her M.A. from the University at Buffalo. Amy’s dissertation investigates the diverse materiality and meaning of recyclia used by contemporary urban Mozambican artists.  She particularly focuses on artists involved with the Transforming Arms into Plowshares/Transformação de Armas em Enxadas (TAE) project, an artists’ group who transform decommissioned weapons from Mozambican wars into art. Amy is currently completing a year of Fulbright-Hays funded research in Mozambique.

Mr. Kyle Lopez (2011-2012)

Kyle Lopez recently completed his Master's in International Policy Studies with a concentration in Conflict Resolution from the Monterey Institute of International Studies. In 2005 he received a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of California, Davis. He became interested in learning a foreign language in 2006 when he lived in Madrid, Spain. From 2007 to 2008 he worked in Bolivia as a Peace Corps volunteer where he trained beekeepers, managed a community water project, taught classes on English and the environment, and initiated the creation of an environmental committee.

Kyle is interested in a wide-range of issues specific to Latin America such as migration and challenges to peace building, but is also passionate about global health and social and economic justice. Currently he lives in Monterey, CA where he works as a volunteer mediator with Restorative Justice Partners Inc. Kyle is excited to join as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Conflict Studies.