Allison’s first job out of graduate school at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism required her to file daily newspaper stories from a small town in Massachusetts. That first job started her on the path of figuring out how to find the extraordinary beneath everyday events. That ability has taken her up and down the east coast of the United States as a newspaper reporter and editor.

With nearly two decades of experience, Allison is also an award-winning radio journalist and producer.

Allison has a knack for listening, for finding threads of a story line that she then weaves together and shares of how larger economic and political forces affect regular people. She does so by immersing herself wherever she discovers the story, for example, rising at 4 a.m. for morning prayers with the monks at a Cistercian monastery or spending time with a farming family on the morning they’re auctioning off their dairy farm.