About Autumn Spanne

Autumn is an independent journalist and editor whose work focuses on the environment, climate change, sustainability, and travel. Her stories, photos and multimedia projects have appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic News, The Guardian, Reveal, the Christian Science Monitor, The Daily Climate, Environmental Health News, CNN, InsideClimate News, Treehugger, and Scholastic. As an educational content writer, she is also skilled at producing both short articles and in-depth explainers aimed at elementary, middle, and high school school students. In addition to her freelance work, Autumn manages newsletters and bilingual content for Environmental Health Sciences. 

Previously, Autumn worked in international education at the University of California and taught English and journalism on the Navajo Nation. She later became an editor at Youth Communication, a pioneering non-profit educational publishing company that trains young people in writing and journalism and publishes their stories in two award-winning magazines and a book series focused on social justice and social/emotional learning. Autumn’s most recent editing work has been for palabra, a multimedia platform of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Autumn was a 2016-17 Ted Scripps fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has also been awarded fellowships from the Metcalf Institute for Environmental and Marine Reporting and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources, as well as a grant from the Earth Journalism Network to report on climate migration in Colombia for National Geographic.

Autumn has an MS from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, an MA in education from Western New Mexico University and a BA in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She also holds TESOL certification from the University of California, Irvine.