Shandra Back knows she isn’t a typical Pulitzer Reporting Fellow. 

Back (’25), a recent COM grad, isn’t working on a master’s degree. Nor has she ever held an internship. But she does have a passion for—and a résumé full of—international reporting, with a focus on human rights.  

Case in point: A travel grant from Boston University’s Center for Forced Displacement sent her to Colombia. There, Back, a multimedia journalist who’s fluent in Spanish, documented the journeys of caminantes, displaced Venezuelans walking across Latin America to escape economic collapse and political unrest in their home country.   

Now she’s in the Dominican Republic. 

The Pulitzer Center is a journalism nonprofit dedicated to using storytelling to effect change. Every year, the Center awards fellowships to students from its Campus Consortium partners, including two students at Boston University. Back is one of 49 Reporting Fellows for 2025.

Her Pulitzer project is reporting on the plight of Haitian migrants working the sugarcane fields in the DR. The sugarcane plantations and the settlements that form around them, known as bateyes, have long served as havens for Haitian workers seeking economic opportunities unavailable in Haiti. But a 2013 ruling revoked the citizenship rights of Dominicans of Haitian descent—resulting in tens of thousands of workers and residents becoming stateless and vulnerable to discrimination and deportation. 

Something I learned very quickly entering into the world of international reporting is the importance of building trust in communities.

Shandra Back

The crisis has escalated in 2025, Back says. That’s due in part to policies in the United States, including the dissolution of the US Agency for International Aid (USAID), which provided critical assistance like food and healthcare to bateye residents. The anti-immigrant ethos in the US has long been echoed in the DR, she says, and will likely worsen once Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status expires later this year, per US Immigration Services. 

The bateyes now undergo frequent police raids. Deportations occur at record rates. Back calls the situation “a perfect storm.”

“Aid systems are collapsing just as deportations spike, leaving stateless families and migrants—who already lack access to education, legal protections or healthcare—in existential peril,” she wrote in her application for the fellowship.

Back previously spent time in the DR while working on her thesis. That’s when she was introduced to the bateyes—through a fellow hostel guest in Santo Domingo who worked for an international aid organization—and gathered background for what would become her Pulitzer project. 

That reporting was critical for both applying for the fellowship and making connections, she says.

“Something I learned very quickly entering into the world of international reporting is the importance of building trust in communities,” Back says. “If I have the time and the money, I absolutely want to be somewhere for as long as I can, to start [forming relationships] before I begin reporting.” 

For her Pulitzer project, Back is spending five weeks in the DR in and around San Pedro de Macorís. About a month of that time will be spent living and reporting in the bateyes. She retained a local “fixer,” a friend of the international aid worker she met in Santo Domingo, to help facilitate introductions and translate the Haitian Creole spoken by many migrants. She’s also speaking to policy experts and community leaders to paint a picture of the DR’s immigration landscape.

Back plans to produce a photo-heavy longform article and a three-part podcast series.  

“My reporting will expose how national and international policy decisions reverberate through these marginalized communities,” she told the Pulitzer committee. “This work will reveal how these plantations—sites of both modern indentured labor and unexpected community resilience—have become ground zero for a border crisis with global implications, where immigration crackdowns in both the DR and US converge to exacerbate a humanitarian crisis.”

After her reporting concludes, Back will begin a two-year California Local News Fellowship through the University of California Berkeley in September. She’ll be working with Northern California Public Media to do longform investigative work with migrant communities near San Francisco.

Back calls the Berkeley fellowship her “dream job.” Like the Pulitzer fellowship, “the odds of me getting this were very slim” as a non-traditional candidate, she says. But she credits both to following her passions. 

“Since high school, my north stars have been Spanish and journalism,” she says. So far, that’s taken her across the Spanish-speaking world, to amplify the voices that get lost among headlines. “Once I started running with that, everything just clicked.”