About

Amelia Nierenberg writes the Education Briefing for The New York Times, a newsletter that covers schools during the pandemic. She also writes the Coronavirus Briefing and other newsletters at the paper.

Amelia moved from the Food desk, where she worked as a member of the inaugural fellowship class at The Times, writing about food and grief, Indigenous food sovereignty and how Chinese restaurants can offer a window into upward socioeconomic mobility. Her story about the effect of the climate crisis on New Mexico’s prized Hatch chile pepper will be published in the 2020 Best American Food Writing anthology from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Before coming to The Times, she lived in Dakar, Senegal, where she worked as an Overseas Press Club Fellow with The Associated Press. Before Dakar, she was a reporting intern with The Boston Globe, where she interviewed almost 80 former high school valedictorians for The Valedictorians Project, a 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Local Reporting.

In 2018, Amelia graduated from Yale University with both a B.A. and an M.A. in intellectual history. Her thesis, on the controversy surrounding the 2005 murder of a young French Jew named Ilan Halimi, won the John Addison Porter Prize. It is among the highest the university confers.

She lives in New York and has reported in 13 states, two Native American nations and five countries, including Poland, the Gambia and Senegal. She comfortably interviews in both French and English.