Alejandra Martinez

Alejandra Martinez is a reporter for KERA and The Texas Newsroom through Report for America (RFA). She's covering the impact of COVID-19 on underserved communities and the city of Dallas.

Within her first year at KERA, Ale won a 2021 regional Edward R. Murrow award in continuing coverage for her reporting on Shingle Mountain, a monstrous 100-foot-tall pile of waste dumped in a community of color. Her work shed light on the effects of environmental racism in the southeast Dallas community of Floral Farms. She rigorously covered it for months, from protests about its existence to its removal.

Before joining KERA, Ale was a producer at WLRN, South Florida’s NPR station where she covered immigration, marginalized communities, and the local arts scene. She would book, write, and produce stories for and the station’s daily talk show, “Sundial,” and she was part of Public Radio International’s (PRI) “Every 30 Seconds” election project, a collaborative public media reporting project tracing the young Latino electorate leading up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond.

Alejandra is no stranger to Texas. A native Texan, she began her broadcast career working with KUT, Austin’s NPR station, first as an intern and later a producer. Ale participated in NPR’s Next-Generation Radio project, a week-long journalism boot camp, where she covered Houston’s recovery post-Hurricane Harvey in 2018.

She graduated from The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism in 2017.

If you’d like to connect with Ale or simply see what she’s reading about, listening to or covering follow her on Twitter — @alereports.