Deepa Fernandes

Deepa Fernandes is a nationally renowned journalist, heard by millions each day during her tenure as co-host of NPR’s “Here and Now”. Her signature warmth and rigor won her many fans and elevated rarely heard voices to a national audience.

The CASBS fellowship will afford this award-winning journalist the luxury of stepping away from the relentless daily news cycle to work on writing projects that have been percolating for years. Fernandes will start a deeply reported memoir where she plans to tell a very different story of America; a tale that weaves rarely heard voices from historically excluded communities with major news events of the past three decades.

Fernandes will also work on her novel, a sweeping generational family saga spanning pre- and post-colonial India. The story is inspired by a trove of letters, exposing feisty characters and family secrets, left behind by Fernandes’s grandmother after she unexpectedly died in a South Indian village soon after the birth of her 7th child.

Fernandes’ career spans nearly three decades and five continents. She has covered guerrilla insurgencies, climate disasters and political coups in countries from Haiti to East Timor, and across the United States. She covers women’s and children’s issues, education, immigration, poverty and indigenous issues. Fernandes has been named “Radio Journalist of the Year” three years in a row by the LA Press Club, and she has won an LA Area Emmy, as well as dozens of awards over the course of her career. In 2003, she founded and ran a national non-profit that aimed to diversify the ranks of journalism by training new reporters in communities of color.  Fernandes was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 2012 and has an MA from Columbia University.