Announcing the 2026 Mental Well-Being in the U.S. Reporting Fellows

Image

The Pulitzer Center is excited to announce the 2026 cohort of Mental Well-Being in the U.S. Reporting Fellows. 

These four Fellows are the first members of the 2026 Campus Consortium Reporting Fellowship cohort and were selected after applying to a special call in December 2025. 

Each Reporting Fellow will receive a grant of $4,000 from the Pulitzer Center, thanks to support from the IV Fund, to complete their reporting projects on mental health and well-being in the U.S. Read on to learn more about the winning Fellows and their reporting topics.

2026 Mental Well-Being in the U.S. Fellows

Kayden Anderson joins the Fellowship cohort from the University of Oklahoma's Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. She plans to graduate in May 2026. Anderson's Pulitzer Center-supported project will examine how Oklahoma tribes—including the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Muscogee Creek—address mental well-being in the Indigenous community despite the underfunded Indian Health Service. Anderson's work has been honored by the Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists, and she served as a summer 2025 political reporting intern with The Oklahoman. 

Anastasiia Carrier is a 2021 graduate of Columbia Journalism School and will co-publish her project with Charlottesville Tomorrow, where she's worked as a public health and safety reporter since May 2024. As a Mental Well-Being Fellow, Carrier will report on the mental health toll of losing access to maternal care after a local hospital in Farmville, Virginia, closed its labor and delivery unit in December 2025. Carrier has previously reported for Charlottesville Tomorrow on the shortage of mental health care providers for youth in Virginia.

Hyeyoon Cho studies journalism and narrative writing at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Cho will use her reporting grant to highlight community-led cultural burning partnerships in Nevada City, California, where the Rancheria Nisenana Tribe is leading land stewardship education initiatives to aid mental well-being amid intensifying wildfires. Before attending UC Berkeley, Cho worked as a researcher for the Korean Broadcast System and as a digital news intern at The Korea Times, both based in Seoul.

Alexa Mikhail graduated with a degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 2021. Her mental well-being project will feature the "sandwich generation," women who simultaneously care for a child and an aging parent. Mikhail will use the stories of her sources to examine the mental health and well-being effects the generation experiences and addresses through caregiving. Mikhail's work has appeared in SHE Media, Fortune magazine, CNN Digital, The 19th, and The Washington Post. 

As part of their Fellowships, the Mental Well-Being in the U.S. Fellows will receive mentorship from a Pulitzer Center grantee, join a professional network of reporters and editors, and have opportunities to participate in workshops and outreach events. They will also attend the Pulitzer Center’s annual Washington Weekend conference for the Center's Reporting Fellows in Washington, D.C., in fall 2026.

Congratulations to the 2026 Mental Well-Being in the U.S. Reporting Fellows!