Ayurella Horn-Muller

Ayurella Horn-Muller is a staff writer at Grist covering the intersection of climate change, food, and agriculture. She previously reported for Axios and Climate Central, and her work has appeared in CNN, National Geographic, The Associated Press, El País, The Atlantic, WIRED, and The Guardian. She has been recognized with a first-place Society of Environmental Journalists Award for Outstanding Beat Reporting and an honorable mention Nina Mason Pulliam Award for Outstanding Environmental Reporting, alongside honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and Green Eyeshades. She is the author of Devoured: The Extraordinary Story of Kudzu, the Vine That Ate the South, and her work has been anthologized in The Best American Food and Travel Writing. 

As a Ted Scripps fellow, Ayurella will investigate how climate change is reshaping the bonds between communities and the crops that have long defined them. From Puerto Rico's coffee farms to Georgia’s sweet onion fields and Arizona's winter lettuce valleys, her reporting will explore what it means to lose these place-based anchors, the conflict between adaptation and ancestry, and how race, class, and power determine who gets to maintain their food identities — and who is forced to abandon them.