Susan Smith Richardson, Editor and Publisher – The Chicago Reporter

Susan Smith Richardson is the editor and publisher of The Chicago Reporter, a nonprofit investigative news organization that focuses on race and poverty.

Richardson previously worked at several publications across the country, including The Texas Observer, the Chicago Tribune, Austin American-Statesman and Sacramento Bee. She most recently served as a research fellow at the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas School of Law, where she directed the Frances T. “Sissy” Farenthold Archives Project.

In 2002, she was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, where she studied housing and community development and the evolution of anti-poverty policies in the United States. She continued her studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she earned a Master in Public Administration in 2004.