P. Steven Ainsley
P. Steven Ainsley is the president and publisher of Pacific Standard. Before joining the magazine in 2011, Ainsley spent three decades as a senior manager with the New York Times Company. His last position with the Times Company was publisher of The Boston Globe. Ainsley has held directorships on the boards of several not-for-profit agencies, and has been recognized as Santa Barbara Humanitarian of the Year and Santa Barbara’s Anti-Defamation League Person of the Year. He is a Rotary International Paul Harris Fellow. Ainsley has been a guest lecturer at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management and Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, and was commencement speaker at the University of North Alabama in 2008. Ainsley holds degrees from New York University and Emory University’s Advanced Management Program.
Maria Streshinsky
Editor in chief Maria Streshinsky comes to Pacific Standard from The Atlantic in Washington D.C., where for four years she served as managing editor, responsible for editorial production of the 155-year-old magazine. At The Atlantic, Streshinsky managed a staff of more than 25 editors, art directors, and interns; and edited a variety of stories. She developed The Atlantic’s Fiction-for-Kindle program with Amazon, working with such authors as Christopher Buckley, Joyce Carol Oates, and Paul Theroux. In 2009 she won the Atlantic Media Company 2009 Chairman’s Award, for editing excellence. Before The Atlantic, Maria spent two years at the U.S. Department of the Interior working on Indian affairs issues. After graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a BA in comparative literature in 1991, she began a career in magazine journalism with VIA, the AAA magazine in San Francisco. She was managing editor before leaving to do contract work as a freelance writer, editor, and consultant.
Craig Edwards
Art director Craig Edwards has more than 15 years experience at regional, national, and international publications. Edwards studied journalism at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, and spent several years working at The Detroit News, designing the arts and entertainment, food, and home design sections. Edwards helped create and launch Distinction, an upscale lifestyle magazine published by the Los Angeles Times. He also served as corporate creative director at Where, an international network of city magazines and museum-quality books published for visitors in more than 50 cities around the world. Edwards also worked at Condé Nast Publications as an art director for Architectural Digest. His work has been recognized by Time magazine, the Society of Publication Designers, the Society for News Design, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts.
John Gravois
John Gravois is the deputy editor at Pacific Standard magazine. Before making his way to California in July 2012, he was an editor and writer at the Washington Monthly, a magazine of politics, policy, and ideas in the nation’s capital. Before that, he was a senior editor of The Review, a weekly supplement to The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi (a publication whose strange tale is detailed here); a staff writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education; and a cub reporter at the Cambodia Daily. For a time, he supplemented his meager freelance writing income by making nifty salads and appetizers at what is now Washington, D.C.’s highest-rated restaurant. He is a graduate of Deep Springs College. His writing has appeared in Slate, The New Republic, New York, and elsewhere.
Nicholas Jackson
Nicholas Jackson is the digital director of Pacific Standard. The former digital editorial director at Outside, he has also worked for The Atlantic, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Texas Monthly, Slate, and other publications, both online and in print. Reach him at njackson@psmag.com or on Twitter at @nbj914.
Vince Beiser
Articles editor Vince Beiser is an award-winning journalist based in Los Angeles. He has exposed conditions in California’s harshest prisons, trained with troops bound for Iraq, ridden with the first responders to Haiti’s earthquake, and hunted down other stories from around the world for publications including the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Wired, The Village Voice, The New Republic, The Nation, Mother Jones, and Rolling Stone. Beiser’s work has been honored by Investigative Reporters and Editors; the Columbia, Medill, and Missouri graduate schools of journalism; the National Mental Health Association; the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies; and many other institutions. He has also twice been part of a team that won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence.
Michael Todd
Most of senior staff writer Michael Todd’s professional life has been spent in journalism at newspapers located from the Marshall Islands to tiny California farming communities. Before joining the publishing arm of the Miller-McCune Center, he was managing editor of the magazine Hispanic Business.
Trish Reynales
Managing editor Trish Reynales entered the publishing world as a graphic artist for clients such as Capra Press and Reason magazine. After receiving her master’s degree in journalism from the University of Southern California, she launched her writing career. Her work has appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, Discovery, the Los Angeles Times, Outside, and The Seattle Times, among others. During a decade living in the Pacific Northwest, she served as a founding editor of Microsoft’s award-winning adventure e-zine Mungo Park. She has also held editorships with Caribbean Travel + Life, Islands, Santa Barbara Magazine, and Virtuoso Life. Reynales has had fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Scripps Howard Foundation; and is a recipient of the Theodore E. Kruglak Award for international reporting.
Tom Jacobs
Staff writer Tom Jacobs is a veteran journalist and former staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News and the Santa Barbara News-Press. Through interviews, reviews, and essays, he has tracked and analyzed trends in the arts and sciences, with an emphasis on psychology, the role of culture, and the cultivation of creativity. A native of Chicago, Jacobs earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern University.
Ryan O’Hanlon
Ryan O’Hanlon is an associate editor at Pacific Standard. Follow him on Twitter @rwohan.
Michael Fitzgerald
Michael Fitzgerald is an associate editor at Pacific Standard. He previously worked at The New Republic in Washington D.C. and Oxford American Magazine in Arkansas, and recently completed a Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs in Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Kihana Langdon
Kihana Langdon is an editorial assistant at Pacific Standard. She received her B.A. in Global and International Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara and studied abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina for a semester.
Lisa Margonelli
Lisa Margonelli, contributing editor, writes about energy, the environment, science, and policy for such publications as Forbes, Slate, Politico, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The New York Times, and many others. She is a research fellow at the New America Foundation. Her book Oil On the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank won the Northern California Book Award for Nonfiction and was named one of the 25 notable books of 2007 by the American Library Association. She has received two excellence in journalism awards from the Society of Professional Journalists. She works in Oakland, California.
Marc Herman
Contributing editor Marc Herman first went abroad as a reporter in 1993. He is the author of Searching for El Dorado, about his travels with Amazonian gold miners, and The Shores of Tripoli, a Kindle Single based on his dispatches from Libya for Miller-McCune and The Atlantic. Raised in Southern California, educated in Northern California, he now lives in Barcelona, Spain.
Interns
Lucas Aznar Miles
Lucas Aznar Miles is an intern in the art department at Pacific Standard. He worked as an editorial assistant at Duomo Ediciones in Barcelona, Spain, before traveling to California where he is currently photographing his way through a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Brooks Institute.
Monica Bobadilla
Monica Bobadilla serves as an editorial intern with Pacific Standard through the Sara Miller McCune Endowed Internship and Public Service Program. Last year, she studied abroad in Spain and Brazil, and is currently a senior at the University of California, Santa Barbara studying for a bachelor’s degree in Global Studies and Communication.
Olivia Cvitanic
Olivia Cvitanic is an editorial intern with Pacific Standard through the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Carsey-Wolf Media Internship Program. She is currently a fourth-year student at UCSB pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Global and International Studies and a minor in Professional Editing.
Sarah Sloat
Sarah Sloat is an editorial intern with Pacific Standard. She was previously selected as an intern for the Sara Miller McCune Endowed Internship and Public Service Program and has studied abroad in both Argentina and the U.K. She recently graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a bachelor’s degree in Global and International Studies.
