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Claire Potter

Claire Potter is a journalist and writer, currently completing her senior year at the University of Chicago where she is majoring in History and English Literature. She is an intern for the Axe Files at CNN, a podcast that produces profiles of leading journalists and politicians as well as thoughtful conversations about our political moment. She is also a reporting fellow at the University of Chicago’s undergraduate newspaper, The Maroon, where she will be covering how COVID-19 has affected the juvenile detention and foster care systems. Right now, she is working on her B.A. Thesis about the changing face of Catholic conservatism in the United States since the 1990s.

During the summer of 2019, she reported on the lead-up to the Iowa Caucus for ABC. She is also one of the Pulitzer Center’s 2020 Student Fellows and is looking forward to covering creative solutions to the water crisis in Mexico City as soon as travel is safe.

In her free time, she hikes, writes short stories, and coordinates a creative writing workshop at Cook County Jail.

Hope in a Deathtrap: Saving Migratory Birds in Chicago

In the hours before dawn, the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors (CBCM) arm themselves with nets and scour the streets looking for the dead and injured victims of the city’s glass. They work in the dark to reach the dead and wounded before a gull or a crow seizes the wounded as prey, before a street cleaner sweeps them into the gutter, before the cars and pedestrians pour downtown, trampling birds too weak to carry themselves to safety.

Memory, Art, and Performance: Three Perspectives on "Leopoldstadt"

What happens when memory fails to pass from one generation to the next? That is the question that University of Chicago professors Leora Auslander, Christine Mehring, and David Levin grappled with in the second seminar of the Deep Dive: Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt series at Court Theatre.

Efforts to raise profile of Native American voters paying off in 2020 campaigns

DES MOINES, Iowa -- Decades-long efforts to increase Native American voting, voting rights and political engagement have paid off for indigenous communities, with Democratic candidates paying unprecedented levels of attention to their issues. In 2018, over 100 Native Americans ran for office. In states like North Dakota with high native populations and close elections, native voters were in a position to influence the midterms.

'As Iowan as cornfields': How immigration changed one small town

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa -- When Maria Gonzalez was 3 years old, her mother heard from family who had already immigrated to the U.S. that she could find work in Marshalltown, Iowa. She followed their advice and took her two young children from Villachuato, their small town in central Mexico, to take a job on the line of the town's meat-processing plant, Swift & Co. That was in the 1990s. Today, though its name has changed, the plant remains the largest employer in the town. For the Gonzalez family,

Ethiopian Diaspora Community Embraces New Prime Minister

Anyone near 9th and M Streets NW in downtown Washington, D.C., on one hot Saturday this summer would have seen steady streams of people in the vibrant green, red, and yellow of the Ethiopian flag making their way to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. There they would join thousands of other Ethiopians who had flooded into the city from across the country to hear their recently elected prime minister Abiy Ahmed speak that afternoon.