Medill accepts 10 fellows into George R.R. Martin Summer Intensive Writing Workshop

Seven-day intensive workshop for mid-career journalists will help them write their first novels

EVANSTON, ILL. -- Ten writers have been accepted into this year’s George R.R. Martin Summer Intensive Writing Workshop at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. The workshop will take place in Evanston in July.

Medill received almost 200 workshop applications from accomplished journalists around the world. The group of fellows includes veteran journalists covering a variety of topics such as entertainment, immigration, business, health, and fashion. They hail from all across the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Israel.

“We are delighted to have these immensely talented writers in our second workshop,” said Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, George R.R. Martin Chair in Storytelling and senior lecturer. “Many have been working on these first novels for years. We look forward to helping them bring these vital stories out into the literary world.”

Over the course of the seven-day workshop, fellows will attend craft-focused classes on the various aspects of writing a novel, workshop their book chapters with instructors who are award-winning novelists themselves, attend firesides with visiting authors, have the opportunity to meet literary agents, and also have concentrated writing time.

"We are very grateful for the vision of George R.R. Martin," Tan said. "His generosity has enabled us to create this workshop which will have an impact on literature."

This year’s participants are:

Joseph Amodio

Amodio is a veteran journalist, television writer and live audio describer. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Focal Point, an award-winning online cybersecurity news magazine. His work covering the changemakers in entertainment, fashion and health has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Men’s Health, Newsday, Los Angeles Times, CNN.com and Barrons.com, and has been syndicated in publications around the world. His true-crime docudramas have aired on Netflix, Discovery, A&E and other outlets.

 

Lucy Fulford

Fulford is a journalist and filmmaker whose work centres around migration and belonging, conflict and climate. Her stories have appeared in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, BBC, CNN and RAI, and she has produced films and written for nonprofits in London including Save the Children, Comic Relief and Global Witness.

Farida Jhabvala Romero

Romero is an award-winning journalist at KQED Public Radio in San Francisco, where she has covered labor, immigration and health. Farida was named one of the 10 Most Influential Latina Journalists in California in 2022 by the California Chicano News Media Association.

 

Olivia Konotey-Ahulu

Konotey-Ahulu is a business reporter from the UK who has worked for Bloomberg News since 2019. After covering the London housing beat and writing about racial disparities in home ownership, she became Bloomberg UK’s first Equality reporter. Her work on the inequity facing Black Britons in the property market and the real estate sector has won awards from the Foreign Press Association, MHP Mischief 30 to Watch and the National Association of Black Journalists.

Dina Kraft

Kraft is Israel Correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and co-author of the best-seller, My Friend Anne Frank, a memoir she wrote with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She is a host and founder of Groundwork, a podcast about Jewish and Palestinian activists and previously was opinion editor at Haaretz English. Kraft is drawn to stories featuring unlikely connections, dual narratives and the impact of conflict on ordinary lives.

Dominique Meury

Meury is a Chinese American writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She spent a decade covering news both big and small, from a Rainbow family gathering of thousands deep in the forest for The Oregonian, to the listing of Bob Hope’s iconic mid-century house in Palm Springs for The Desert Sun, and the impact of speculative housing frenzies on China’s slowing economy for The Wall Street Journal.

 

Massarah Mikati

Mikati is a seasoned journalist, consultant and trainer dedicated to helping newsrooms and journalists implement more inclusive, culturally competent and community-centered engagement journalism at an institutional level. With a deep commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices, she has pioneered new beats from Upstate New York to Texas showcasing the diversity and complexity of communities of color. Her work focuses on repairing and strengthening the relationship between newsrooms and the communities they serve.

Campbell Robertson

Robertson has been a journalist with The New York Times for more than 20 years. He has reported on the Broadway theater business, covered the war in Iraq and drew a series of comics from the presidential campaign trail. For most of his career at the Times he has been a reporter on the national desk, first in the South, where he wrote about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, life inside Alabama prisons and the fallout from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Currently he is the Times’s Mid-Atlantic Bureau Chief, covering seven states and Washington, D.C.

Michal Schick

Schick is an Orthodox Jewish writer of screen and prose, and a former entertainment journalist, based in New York City. After nearly 10 years of work as an entertainment journalist at Hypable.com, Schick served as a staff writer on seasons four through seven of the Emmy Award-winning Netflix series The Dragon Prince. Her prose work has been featured in New Myths Magazine, as well as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's "Tiny Book of Tiny Stories,” and her screenwriting has placed highly at competitions such as the Austin Film Festival, PAGE Awards, CineQuest, and Filmmatic Comedy Screenwriting Competition.

Jonny Wrate

Wrate is an investigative reporter with the Latin American team at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). His work uncovers illicit financial flows, offshore shell company structures, and transnational criminal networks. Collaborative projects on which he has worked have won multiple awards and have been published in multiple languages, such as two complex, multi-billion-dollar money laundering schemes set up in the former Soviet Union, and an exposé of a previously unreported Romanian criminal organisation that had embedded itself in the heart of Mexico's tourist destinations.