Advisor
Kelley Benham French
Kelley Benham French teaches reporting and writing at The Media School at Indiana Universtiy. She is also a special projects editor at USA TODAY. She was a 2013 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Never Let Go, a three-part series on the birth of her extremely premature daughter, Juniper, who was born at 23 weeks gestation. The series, published in the Tampa Bay Times, explored the science and ethics of saving babies born at the edge of viability and told the story of Juniper’s 196 days in the neonatal intensive care unit.
French is the recipient of a number of national awards, including SPJ’s Sigma Delta Chi Award and Bronze Medallion, Scripps Howard’s Ernie Pyle Award for Human Interest Writing, The National Headliner Award, the Casey Medal and the Dart Award.
With her husband, Professor of Practice Thomas French, she is the author of Juniper: The Girl Who Was Born Too Soon, published by Little, Brown. The book was an Amazon.com Best Book of the Month and was reviewed in the Washington Post, USA Today and many other national publications.
She is a frequent speaker in newsrooms and at journalism conferences around the world, as well as at medical and nursing conferences, where she speaks on the importance of language in critical care conversations and other subjects related to extreme prematurity.
She has bachelor’s degrees in journalism and political science from the University of Florida and a master’s degree from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park.