Alia Dastagir

Alia Dastagir is an award-winning former reporter for USA Today who frequently covers gender and mental health. Dastagir was one of eight U.S. recipients of the prestigious Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism. She won a first-place National Headliner Award for a series on suicide and was the first winner of the American Association of Suicidology’s Public Service Journalism Award. The Media Awards Committee for the Council on Contemporary Families named her story on America’s lack of affordable childcare the winner for Outstanding Media Coverage of Family Issues. She is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at NYU, where she is an Axinn fellow.