ABOUT

Alia Wong is an award-winning reporter based in Washington, D.C., who covers inequities in education for USA TODAY. She is also working on two in-depth reporting projects—one through the Woodrow Wilson Higher Education Media Fellowship and the other through the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information’s reporting fellowship.

Alia previously worked as a staff writer and associate editor at The Atlantic, where she developed its education section. Born and raised in Hawai‘i, she began her journalism career as a watchdog education reporter at Honolulu Civil Beat. She was the recipient of two national awards from the Education Writers Association for work she did for Civil Beat, including the first place prize for a diverse collection of education-related news articles and second place for a series she wrote on several charter schools on Hawai‘i’s Big Island. She also won a first-place prize from the Society of Professional Journalists’s Hawaii chapter for her story “A Lost Child of Kalaupapa,” a piece she wrote in college as a Civil Beat intern.

Alia, who’s fluent in Spanish, graduated from Boston University in May 2012 with degrees in journalism and Latin American studies—each with a summa cum laude honor. She attended BU on the Martin Luther King Jr. full-tuition merit scholarship, which entailed leadership responsibilities at the university’s multicultural center among other volunteer activities. As an undergraduate, she collaborated with the BU Spanish-language and Latin American-studies professor Adela Pineda Franco to conduct research on the immediate and long-lasting impacts of the Mexican Revolution on United States policy, diplomacy, and intellectual thought. The project was published as part of the 2019 book The Mexican Revolution on the World Stage: Intellectuals and Film in the Twentieth Century.

>>> Alia’s resume is available upon request.