Lissa Soep

Lissa Soep is an editor, producer, writer, and researcher who started a hybrid career bridging journalism and scholarship after she finished a PhD, turned down a professor job, and instead joined Youth Radio, a Peabody-winning nonprofit newsroom (now YR Media) in Oakland, California. At YR, she produced and edited hundreds of features for outlets including NPR and the New York Times; established the organization’s tech and mental health desks and research division; and founded the country’s first youth coding program embedded in a national newsroom. Since 2020, she has been a senior editor for audio at Vox Media, where she’s edited shows including Land of the Giants, Little America, and Today Explained. She runs a learning and speaker series and helped create Language, Please: style guidance for storytellers of all kinds looking to thoughtfully cover evolving social, cultural, and identity-related issues. Lissa’s narrative nonfiction book, Other People’s Words: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations that Never End (Spiegel & Grau), came out in April, 2024. Her other books are Code for What? (MIT Press with Clifford Lee), Participatory Politics (MIT Press), Drop that Knowledge (UC Press with Vivian Chávez), and Youthscapes (UPenn Press with Sunaina Maira).