Levi Bridges and Alissa Greenberg Win Overseas Press Club Awards

Journalism students Levi Bridges (’17) and Alissa Greenberg (’16) are among the recipients of 2016 Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar Awards, which are intended to encourage young journalists to pursue careers reporting from abroad. The two are among 15 aspiring foreign correspondents selected from a pool of 175 applicants from 50 colleges and universities.

Bridges and Greenberg continue the long tradition of Berkeley students being awarded this prestigious honor. Recent winners include Ted Andersen (’16), James Reddick (’15), Mateo Hoke (’14) and Xiaoqing Pi (’13).

The honorees received their awards Feb. 26 at an awards banquet held at the Yale Club in New York City. Levi Bridges received the Stan Swinton Fellowship, which will enable him to work in the Moscow bureau of the Associated Press. In his winning essay, Bridges, a graduate of Alfred University, wrote about the mistreatment of carnival workers from Tlapacoyan, Mexico, who are on H-2B visas in the U.S. Bridges has lived in Mexico on-and-off for the past decade, reporting primarily on immigration and migrant workers.

Bridges has also long had a fascination with Russia, and once spent a summer biking across the country with a friend. Last year, he learned that many foreign correspondents he admired had gotten their start in Russia. Bridges applied to spend a summer at Middlebury Language Schools refining his Russian skills; he was later awarded the Foreign Language and Area Studies grant in Russian, which subsidized both a Master of Journalism degree and Russian language courses at Berkeley. In addition to his studies in Russian, Bridges is fluent in Spanish.

Bridges plans to use the summer in Moscow with the Overseas Press Club Foundation as an opportunity to do initial research for his Berkeley master’s thesis. He is interested in pursuing a story about immigrants from the former Soviet Republic who are reconstructing the Luzhniki stadium for the FIFA 2018 Olympics.

Alissa Greenberg, a Wesleyan University graduate, received the David Schweisberg Memorial Scholarship for her essay about how the spread of palm oil plantations in Malaysia was crowding out other forms of life and livelihood, and has had particular impact on the indigenous Mah Meri tribe.

Greenberg is a seasoned traveler and overseas reporter, having worked in Spain for three years and interned for Time magazine in Hong Kong last summer. She is currently writing an anthro-travel memoir, “Across,” which details her overland trip from Helsinki to Beijing, through Finland, Russia, China, and Mongolia. She has written for The Los Angeles Times, the Portland Phoenix, and Wesleyan Magazine, as well as online for Time, Roads & Kingdoms, Pacific Standard, the Morning News, and KQED. Greenberg is fluent in Spanish and proficient in Mandarin.

“Just being able to sit in a room with a reporter like [Associated Press Senior Correspondent for Pakistan and Afghanistan] Kathy Gannon was an incredible experience,” Greenberg said. “I’m completely delighted to have been chosen for the scholarship.”

“Winning an Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar Award is a huge honor and a dream come true. Before I came to grad school I had this vision of what I wanted to do afterwards and I can now see it becoming a reality. It’s going way better than I ever expected,” Bridges said.

By Melissa Batchelor Warnke (’17)