Kastalia Medrano
Kastalia Medrano is Filter’s deputy editor, the Travel Writer at Thrillist, and was on the Science team at Newsweek. Her freelance journalism has run at or is forthcoming in VICE, the Paris Review Daily, Teen Vogue, Pacific Standard, National Geographic, Time Magazine., Real Life, The Sun, Newsweek, and many others. She worked as an ASME intern for National Geographic magazine in 2012 and attended the Yale Writers Conference in June 2014. Her journalism work has covered a wide range of topics from breaking news to travel, space, politics, literature, and more.
In an interview with Story about her first personal essay, “Monster,” Medrano wrote, “I know that there are a lot of people from whom essays on personal trauma – not necessarily mine, just essays – are a life raft, a tool to help them feel, as you say, less alone.” The full interview can be found here.
Medrano is a peer worker at a syringe program, Vocal New York, in Brooklyn, where she works to help disadvantaged communities by field-testing low-income New Yorkers for hepatitis C and navigating their treatment. She is a volunteer at the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center. In one of her recent articles, “How the Pandemic Hit People Who Use Drugs, in Their Own Words,” Medrano states: “A routine failure of mainstream journalism is to write about drugs without listening to the people who use them.”
Medrano was born in Littleton, Colorado. She graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in print and digital journalism. She now lives in Manhattan, New York.
Updated June 2022