The Curve Foundation, with NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists, is pleased to announce the 2026-27 recipients of the Curve Fellowship for Emerging Journalists!
The recipients are the following. Read below for their bios!
・Becca Most (Tacoma, WA)
・Clarissa Brooks (Atlanta, GA)
・Divya Karthikeyan (Louisville, KY)
・Meghan McKinney (Des Moines, IA)
・Shruti Rajkumar (New York, NY)
Co-presented with NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists, the annual fellowship provides generous financial support, professional mentorship, and publishing opportunities for emerging journalists whose work elevates the voices of LGBTQ+ women, trans, and nonbinary people.
We are excited to kick off their fellowship at the 2026 NLGJA Conference in September!
Meet the 2026-27 Curve Fellowship Recipients:
Becca Most (she/her)
Becca Most is an investigative journalist covering the community of Tacoma, Washington and the South Puget Sound region for the Tacoma News Tribune. As a student reporter in 2020 she covered the varied impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and civil unrest in Minneapolis and St. Paul the summer George Floyd was murdered, going on to cover a variety of local government, arts and social issues in rural Central Minnesota. An LGBTQ+ journalist, Becca cares deeply about her community and uses that empathy to drive her engaging, fact-based reporting.
In her time at the Tacoma News Tribune she has exposed corruption and mismanagement within local LGBTQ+ organizations, as well as highlighted the resiliency of the local transgender community and LGBTQ+ youth. Becca covers a variety of topics for the Tacoma News Tribune, including local government, arts, investigations, the environment, business, breaking news, housing, homelessness and the economy. In the three years she’s worked there, Becca has won five first-place awards and two second-place awards for local LGBTQ+ reporting. When she’s not at her desk, you can often find her searching for sea glass, camping and reading contemporary fiction.
Clarissa Brooks (she/her)
Clarissa Brooks is a Black Queer writer from Charlotte, NC. She is invested in the cultural production of Black people across the diaspora. Raised as a journalist and music critic, she comes from the world of community organizing, always tending towards abolition and the ripening of socialist futures. Brooks lives in the wake of cultural workers like Toni Cade Bambara, Greg Tate, and Amiri Baraka. Where she seeks to make, undo, and sort through the Black art of these times. Brooks’ work has appeared in Office Magazine, The Cut, and Rolling Stone. She is currently Assistant Editor at The Oxford American. Brooks is a 2018 Spelman College graduate, a child of stubborn Black women, and a descendant of queer elders made invisible.
Divya Karthikeyan (she/her)
Divya Karthikeyan is the editorial manager at Queer Kentucky, Kentucky’s sole LGBTQ+ newsroom. She’s a freelance journalist and audio producer with eight years of experience in journalism in India and the U.S. Her work has focused on how people make meaning of the world around them, particularly in the context of policy, power, and everyday life. She translates complex stories, case studies and ideas for wider audiences without sacrificing nuance.
She’s also one of ten Solutions Journalism Network Youth Building & Belonging Fellows in the U.S., exploring the role of restorative practices in conflict resolution and self-esteem building among Black girls and young adults in Louisville, Kentucky. She also works with schools and universities to build oral history work into their curriculum.
Her reporting has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, MS NOW, NPR, The Guardian, VICE News and CNN. She’s covered housing, politics, caste inequality, gender-based violence, LGBTQ+ issues, labor and criminal justice. She has won multiple regional and national honors from the Society of Professional Journalists, Public Media Journalists Association and the RTDNA Edward Murrow Awards. She served as a board member for the South Asian Journalists Association from 2023 to 2025. She helped build and report for the race and equity beat at Louisville Public Media, an NPR member station, where she also covered state politics and community-driven accountability stories.
Meghan McKinney (she/her)
Meghan McKinney is journalist covering LGBTQ rights and child welfare at Iowa Public Radio, where she also serves as the Morning Edition Host.
She started her career at Ozarks Public Radio while studying journalism at Missouri State University as a first-generation student. Before graduating in 2024, she was finalist in the 2023 NPR College Podcast challenge for her podcast on religious trauma.
Her work has also been recognized by the Midwest Broadcast Journalists Association, Iowa Broadcast News Association and the Missouri Broadcasters Association.
Having spent time in foster care, she is dedicated to uplift the experiences of those who have been impacted by public systems, policy and marginalization.
Shruti Rajkumar (they/them)
Shruti Rajkumar is a freelance reporter based in New York. Previously, they were an associate breaking news reporter at HuffPost, where they covered U.S. news, politics, culture, as well as a disability beat. Rajkumar has a B.S. in Journalism from Emerson College and is a student at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Their work has been published in NPR, The Boston Globe Magazine, the Guardian, Prism, and more.
