Jeanne Carstensen

Jeanne Carstensen (2019) is an award-winning journalist whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Intercept, The Nation, Salon, Nautilus, Al Jazeera America and other publications. From 2015 to 2017, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting awarded her three grants to cover the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece, Turkey and Europe for US media. Her dispatches from the region were heard nationally on PRI’s The World and NPR. She was an Immigration Journalism Awards finalist for her story about Syrian refugees paying smugglers to go back to Syria, which appeared in The Global Post. 

Carstensen was managing editor of Salon and The Bay Citizen, where she co- led the team that produced the Bay Area pages of The New York Times, and a senior editor at SFGate and The Whole Earth Review. She won a National Arts Journalism Program fellowship at Columbia University for her cultural reporting. Carstensen is active in the Bay Area writing community where she is a member of the acclaimed North 24th Writers Workshop and the Castro Writers Cooperative. 

While a fellow at the Logan Nonfiction Program, she will work on her first book, “A Greek Tragedy,” a chronicle of 24 hours in the refugee crisis during a deadly shipwreck on the Greek island of Lesbos on October 28, 2015.