In Conversation: Journalists on Their Own Stories

Teresa Frontado is the executive editor of KUT. She is an award winning journalist with more than 20 years of experience working for media organizations in the United States and Latin America. Ms. Frontado speaks four languages (Spanish, English, French and Portuguese) and obtained her journalism degree from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Venezuela. She has two Master’s degrees: one from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and another one from the University of Miami. She was a New York Times Fellow at the Maynard Institute for Leadership at Harvard University as well as a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan (Class of 2016), where she conducted research on social media strategies for legacy media.

Maria Hinojosa is the Emmy Award-winning journalist and anchor and executive producer of NPR’s Latino USA. Her nearly thirty-year career as a journalist includes reporting for PBS, CBS, WGBH, WNBC, CNN, and NPR. She has won several awards, including four Emmys, the Studs Terkel Community Media Award, two Robert F. Kennedy Awards, and the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Overseas Press Club. She is the founding co-anchor of the political podcast In The Thick. In her memoir Once I Was You (Atria Books) Hinojosa tells the story of immigration in America through her family’s experiences and decades of reporting, painting an unflinching portrait of a country in crisis. She shares her experience growing up Mexican American on the south side of Chicago and offers a personal and eye-opening account of how the rhetoric around immigration has not only long informed American attitudes toward outsiders, but also enabled willful negligence and profiteering at the expense of our country’s most vulnerable populations. In a starred review Publishers Weekly called it “A powerful memoir that doubles as an essential immigration primer.”

Ilia Calderón is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, the coanchor of Univision’s flagship evening newscast Noticiero Univision, and cohost of Univision’s primetime news magazine Aquí y Ahora. She is the first Afro-Latina to anchor a national weekday evening newscast for a major Hispanic broadcast network in the United States. Afro-Colombian journalist Ilia Calderón tells her story in My Time to Speak: Reclaiming Ancestry and Confronting Race (Atria), from learning about racism after moving to a new city in Colombia, to confronting racism in castings and later on, in her new country, in which she thought racial issues had been resolved, being threatened by a  KKK member after an interview. And in My Time to Speak, she discusses how she built a new identity in the United States in the midst of racially charged violence and political polarization. Publishers Weekly called it a ” fascinating memoir . . . Calderón stresses the importance of confronting racism head-on, using her platform to report on and expose injustice. [Her] powerful story will resonate with readers.”