Celeste Fremon

I'm a longtime LA journalist specializing in gangs, law enforcement, criminal justice and education reform, and the author of G-Dog and the Homeboys. In March of 2007, I pretty much jumped ship from conventional deadline journalism to found WitnessLA, a social justice news website. I did so with a grant from the Justice and Journalism fund. In the 2 1/2 years since its launch, I've been stunned and heartened at the degree to which the site has been embraced as a source of social justice news, reporting and commentary that would otherwise slip through the cracks in the present media landscape of Los Angeles. In addition to my own work, I teach reporting and news writing at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism and am a visiting lecturer for the Literary Journalism program at UC Irvine. In the past few years, teaching has become a second calling for me, and I love every day I spend with the wildly smart and inquisitive students I am privileged to encounter in my classrooms. At UCI, I'm teaching a brand new class titled The Digital Narrative: Literary Journalism Reimagined for the Web. I'm also working on a new book titled An American Family, about a former gang member/parolee and his family during his first four years out of prison. In addition to the above, I frequently run in the hills of Topanga Canyon with Loup-Loup the wolf dog, sometimes raft rivers in West Glacier, Montana, when I can manage to get up there, always admire the work of my wonderful son, Will Mason, and occasionally try to get some sleep. (But how important is sleep anyway, really when you think about it.)