Herstory

Hi, I’m Robyn Vincent, a newsroom leader, collaborator, and a nomadic heart. My wandering proclivities tend to inform my work, which strives to connect the dots between local, national and global issues.

For the last decade I have worked as a reporter and editor mining stories at the intersection of the New and Old West. Currently I am a reporter for the Mountain West News Bureau, a consortium of NPR stations covering the region. In this role, I am building the bureau’s first inequality beat centered on civil rights, race, class, culture and identity. Before that, I spearheaded and launched the first news department at Jackson Hole Community Radio. I also am the former editor of Wyoming’s only alternative press: the now-defunct Planet Jackson Hole. I led that newspaper to win its first national award for a series I directed on the narratives of forcibly displaced people. It chronicled one reporter’s experience living and working with Syrian refugees in Lesvos, Greece. That work—published in the only state that lacks a refugee resettlement program—typifies my favorite kind of journalism: that which dispels notions of “the other” and elevates marginalized voices. I hold a bachelor’s degree in print and online journalism from Wayne State University in Detroit and belong to Investigative Reporters and Editors, Ida B. Wells Society, and the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association.

For this, my travel blog, it is worth noting my propensity (love?) for misadventure. Crawling on my stomach through a cobwebbed, ancient underground city in Turkey; fording rivers in the Japanese backcountry during winter; and a weeklong stint sleeping in shepherd’s huts in the remote Albanian Alps are just a few examples.

Still, adventure, or misadventure, is but one element of the journey.

I often view my travels through a nuanced, journalistic lens. That means embedding in communities to understand political and social issues as they affect everyday folks, studying and speaking different languages (with great humility), and photographing compelling people and places. Most recently, I spent several months in the Middle East to study Arabic, deepen my knowledge of the region, and trace my Arab roots.

Traveling also has reaffirmed my journalistic path. When I was a fledgling reporter, I traveled to New Orleans to rebuild a home destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. During my downtime, I peeled away the city’s celebratory layers and reported on and photographed some of the people struggling to rebuild their lives five years after the storm. For me, that trip illuminated journalism’s vital role uncovering stories of the unheard.

Find some of my print, audio and visual journalism here.