MONIQUE PARSONS
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I create print and audio news feature stories and long form audio documentaries about religion in America. You can hear my work on the NPR News shows Morning Edition and All Things Considered, WBEZ Chicago, KALW San Francisco, and the podcasts Interfaith Voices and Crosscurrents.

​In 2020, I produced two audio docs for a global reporting project on spiritual engagement as a journalist-fellow for the USC Center for Religion & Civic Culture. My profile of Aisha al-Adawiya
 told how a Black Muslim convert's struggle to claim space and power for women in mosques inspired a national movement and a fatwa. The other profiled two Mennonite musicians who work with male sex workers and wrote a musical about it.

More about me: I'm a big fan of the online journal Religion & Politics, a project of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. I contribute to the journal (tagline: "fit for polite company") and stood in as temporary managing editor in 2019.  My 2017 radio documentary, An American Mosque, followed one community's quest to build a mosque in the suburbs of Chicago. It won a Wilbur Award from The Religion Communicators Council. I've also written for Religion News Service and Beliefnet.com, and I've been lucky to work with wonderful editors, beginning in the newsrooms of weekly and daily newspapers in California and New Jersey. My religion reporting has been honored by the Religion News Association and by the Garden State Association of Black Journalists. I'm profoundly grateful for my family (here's an NPR piece I did about my dad), as well as the friends and teachers I met at Cate School, Princeton University, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and Harvard Divinity School. 

​Thanks for visiting. You can contact me here.

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  • Journalism
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