Columbia Journalism School is pleased to announce the 2021 Tony Horwitz Fellows, Indrani Basu, ‘14 M.S., and Regin Winther Poulsen, '20 M.A. Politics.
For her fellowship project, Basu will report on a multi-generation family of indigenous fishermen in Alaska, tracing the family history and documenting how each generation has chosen to keep their traditional occupation alive as they navigate the challenges posed by climate change and shifting economic factors. Basu is a freelance journalist based in Washington, DC. She served as a managing editor for Chalkbeat’s collaborations with nonprofit investigative newsrooms for coverage of the 2020 U.S. elections. She was also part of the founding team that launched HuffPost India in 2014.
Poulsen will address the impact on the people and institutions of Greenland as the U.S., Russia, and China show increased interest in and competition over the resources of the island country, which has an abundance of rare-earth minerals and strategic military importance in the Arctic. Poulsen is a freelance journalist based in New York, originally from The Faroe Islands, a self-governing archipelago in the Northeast Atlantic under the external sovereignty of Denmark. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera English, and Hakai Media, among others. Poulsen has previously worked as a researcher at Al Jazeera English and as a journalist in several Faroese journalistic institutions.
The fellowship honors the late Tony Horwitz (1958-2019), a 1983 graduate of the Master of Science Program who won the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting in 1995 while at The Wall Street Journal and authored more than a half dozen books including the New York Times Best Sellers "Confederates in the Attic," "Blue Latitudes," "Baghdad Without a Map" and "A Voyage Long and Strange." In its second year, the fellowship is open to Journalism School graduates from the last ten years and supports reporting projects “that bridge divides and promote equality and understanding.”
For more information on the Tony Horwitz Fellowship, visit https://journalism.columbia.edu/horwitz-fellowship.
