Led by City Bureau engagement reporter Jerrel Floyd, four emerging reporters are looking into the election process in Chicago. Their focus is on the state of politics in 2024, how people can participate in elections and civic engagement after November, and more. Check back here to see what we find.
Who Are We?
City Bureau Civic Reporting Fellows spend 16 weeks improving their journalism skills and immersing themselves in community reporting. (Staff photos by Ariel Cheung/City Bureau; header photo by Wendy Piersall, Sparkplugging.com/Flickr)
Khalil Dennis
by Gabriella Gladney
Khalil Dennis has consistently navigated multiple identities. As a City Bureau fellow, they hope to use their unique perspective to share the stories of the different communities they belong to.
Born in Silver Spring, Maryland, and raised in the rural town of Winder, Georgia, Dennis brings an assortment of lived experiences to their work. After earning their bachelor’s degree in saxophone performance from the University of Kentucky, they were diagnosed with focal dystonia, a condition that prevented them from practicing as a musician. They expanded their arts practice to illustration and written poetry. Their interlocking identities as Black, trans, a first-generation Jamaican American, and disabled deeply informs their artistic process — and now their approach to journalism.
“I want to be able to write a call to action with my poetry, and have it be something that's generative,” Dennis said. “That's also how I think about journalism. It can be used as a way to mobilize people.”
In August 2021, Dennis moved to Chicago from Lexington, Kentucky. Drawn to the city’s vibrant Black queer scene and its reputation as a hub for poetry, jazz, and activism, they quickly made a home here. They first began working with City Bureau through the Documenters program, an experience that allowed them to better understand Chicago’s civic landscape.
Gabriella Gladney
by Khalil Dennis
Born and raised in Houston, Texas, Gabriella Gladney became enamored with the narrative storytelling of NPR and the hijinks of the “Tom Joyner Morning Show” during car rides with her father, leading to her current work as a podcast producer.
In her youth, Gladney would visit her grandparents’ riverside house in Rockford, Illinois, spending day trips exploring Chicago. Her reverence for the city’s legacy grew with each visit, from Nat King Cole’s seminal blues career to Emmett Till’s childhood home. After attending Spelman College, where she began her production career as the founding director and host of her college’s podcast “The Blue,” Gladney returned to the Windy City, currently residing in Bronzeville where her grandfather spent his youth.
Today, she works with Sirius XM and is working on a feature with the podcast “99% Invisible,” where she investigates Black beauty supply stores. “For a lot of people, it's their first experience being profiled or followed,” she said.
Her work seeks to protect both Black girlhood and womanhood in all its forms. This is modeled through her beginning volunteer work with Court Appointed Special Advocates, and her investigation of Black women’s narratives which are often suppressed, misrepresented, and — literally — missing.
Chitra Iyer
by NaBeela Washington
Chitra Iyer grew up in Aurora, Illinois, deeply intertwined in the Indian arts community, where she cultivated connections to Carnatic or South Indian classical music. Since she was 10 years old, she has played the violin, and performed with chamber choral and orchestral groups, including the Suzuki Institute, and public orchestras in Chicago, such as the Protégé Philharmonic.
After studying biology at the University of Illinois Chicago, at Urbana-Champaign, she relocated to Jacksonville, Florida, where she served as an AmeriCorps member and worked at LGBTQ+ youth center JASMYN.
In 2017, she returned to Chicago because of its undeniable abundance of stories to explore, as well as a supportive Desi community. Moving to the Kenwood neighborhood on the South Side to serve with the National Health Corps at Howard Brown Chicago, she was confronted with pervasive and harmful narratives in the community, which further fueled her desire to challenge these stories through her work.
She is drawn to journalism as a way to use data and storytelling to think critically, explore diverse perspectives, and ultimately promote connection, collaboration and change. “Despite Chicago’s diversity, we often feel disconnected.” she says.“I want to focus on the person behind the story and challenge the narratives that are too often taken at face value."
NaBeela Washington
by Chitra Iyer
From an early age, NaBeela Washington wrote short fiction and poetry while growing up in Birmingham, Alabama. She didn’t initially view it as a career path, but eventually, she recalls, “journalism found me.”
Washington has always wanted to help people, and considered a range of careers from nursing to teaching. At the University of Alabama at Birmingham, she coupled that with her love for storytelling and graduated with a degree in visual advertising.
After earning her master’s degree in English and creative writing and living on the East Coast, Washington eventually relocated to Chicago to support youth through creative writing programs, and fell in love with a city that, to her, “has a bit of everything.”
In the Windy City, she founded Lucky Jefferson, an award-winning creative arts nonprofit combining art and advocacy to reduce harm in publishing, and curates public arts exhibits. An accomplished poet, she has received a Best New Poets nomination and a Voices of Color Poet Fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.
She was drawn to City Bureau because of its commitment to human-centered community engagement and reporting. She views her writing as “a tool to move people, to change communities,” and strives to uplift marginalized voices and to address stark gaps and racial disparities in media coverage. Today, her work appears in Eater, Chicago Reader, South Side Weekly and the TRiiBE.
Jerrel Floyd
by Sarah Conway
Jerrel Floyd feels his roots in small-town Alabama in Black Chicago from the way that people walk down the street to catching a family relaxing on the stoop. Sharing Black stories is exactly what brought him here – documenting living history through communities telling their own stories.
“People want to be storytellers about where they come from, how they feel about their lives. They want to tell their individual stories,” he said. Inquisitive, thoughtful and perceptive, Floyd creates space in his reporting for communities of color to explore memory and process how systems impact their daily lives.
Floyd found his footing in journalism as a reporter and editor as an undergraduate at Morehouse College’s student newspaper, The Maroon Tiger. He began his career at ProPublica Illinois as a reporting fellow where he explored the powerful histories of abandoned black cemeteries, an interest sparked during his graduate studies in investigative journalism at American University where he collaborated on projects with PBS Frontline and the Washington Post.
Before City Bureau, he was as a local government reporter with the Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, covering a broad range of topics from growth and development to education and health. He brings eight years of reporting experience to his work as an engagement reporter covering affordable housing, development and food access, a beat he anchors in connecting communities with resources and ultimately building their own narratives.
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